5 Best Digital Activities for Your Band Class

 

Whether it be because of snow days, weather closures, state testing, or any of the other things that can throw our schedules out of whack, sometimes band teachers need to teach their kids without instruments involved. Check out these 5 ideas for online activities to do with your middle school or high school band class!

1.    Chrome Music Lab

If you’ve been around here for long, you know I love Chrome Music Lab. Middle schoolers or high schoolers can get as much of a kick out of it as elementary students can! Chrome Music Lab is a set of free, browser based musical experiments created by Google. Have students recreate famous melodies or compose their own in Song Maker, have them turn their drawings into music with Kandinsky (like in my Kandinsky Drawing Challenge), or have them work on their major and minor chords with Arpeggios. There are so many possibilities with this tool – check out one of my blog posts specifically on the topic to see more!

2.    Rhythm Games

I love using the site 4four.io for rhythm games – there are lots of options out there, but this site has really simple interfaces that make it straightforward for students to use no matter what device they may be on. There are some cool song creation tools on there as well that I haven't personally had time to play with yet, but look interesting!

3.    Fingering Trainers

There are a few great fingering trainers out there for kids to quiz themselves on the fingerings on their instrument. The ones I use are:

FLUTE: http://www.flutetrainer.com/
CLARINET: http://www.clarinettrainer.com/
 I have never found a good one for saxophones – if you know of one, let me know!
BRASS: https://classic.musictheory.net/brass/ (this one is very comprehensive but does need a bit of poking around in the settings – I would definitely go over this one with your students in class first, or provide screenshots so they can make sure they set their settings correctly)
PERCUSSION/KEYBOARD: https://www.musictheory.net/exercises/keyboard

4.    Ear Training Games

Again, there are many sites out there for this – I go with the old classic https://www.musictheory.net/exercises most of the time!

5.    Research Projects

If you have a few days in a row of no instrument learning, it’s a great time to introduce a project to your students! I’ve loved doing History of an Instrument or Soundtrack of My Life in the past, or you can have your students do more in-depth research about a genre of music, an instrument, a composer, or a piece you’re playing!

Fall & Winter Resource Round Up - 5 Seasonal Favourites for the Music Room

 

Now that the school year has been chugging along for a while, I can feel myself slipping back into old music class routines and revisiting old favourites. As much as I love my old favourites, it’s a lot more fun for the kids (and for myself!) to throw in some new things now and then! I thought I’d share my 5 favourite resources to use in Fall and Winter in the music room!

1.       Recorder Treat BAG

One thing that I struggle with is having students who can’t celebrate Halloween in classes with students who love Halloween and want to do as many seasonal activities as we can. I wrote Recorder Treat BAG with this in mind – there are 6 songs with candy-themed names that students can play through alone as practice, or in centers with each other. It comes with 2 levels of rhythmic difficulty so you can match the task to your student’s abilities. It’s a great reintroduction to recorder for students who haven’t played since last year, or a great activity for students who are newer to recorder!

2.    Spooky Listening

Another great seasonal but not too Halloween-y activity to do is listening to spooky music! Some of my favourites include Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Danse Macabre, and Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. You can do any of your usual listening activities with these pieces – I love doing colour by number listening glyphs (I use this bundle by Jena Hudson), listen and roll, or even just having students draw what the music makes them think of. This is great to do for the few days around Halloween when students need something to focus all the crazy energy they have

3.       Spooky Shaker and other fun videos on Swick’s Classroom

I’ve talked about how much I love Swick’s Classroom before – his Spooky Shaker song is just one of my favourites to do around Halloween! Kids love this way to make egg shakers more exciting.

4.       15 Performance Review Worksheets

 

With Fall comes our first performances of the year – for me that’s Remembrance Day, which is coming up in less than a month! I love using worksheets from this bundle after performances to get the students’ views on how they did. Plus, kids never get enough of watching themselves back on video, so it’s a fun way to wrap up the whole concert experience!

5.       Charlie Brown Xmas Listening

Charlie Brown Christmas has always been my favourite Christmastime special, so I knew I had to write a little listening unit to go with it. This is great for those few classes after your winter concert, or with grades that aren’t performing at your winter concert. It’s educational, but also interesting enough to keep kids engaged in those last weeks where they just want to be on break already!

 

I hope you get the chance to check out some of the resources I talked about today – happy teaching!