4 Tips for Running Successful Recorder Centers in Your Music Room

 

Using centers has completely revolutionized my teaching of recorder (and ukulele!) in my elementary music classroom. When I teach my recorder unit, I do alternating classes of full class instruction and centers. It helps my students work on their individual skills, their independence, and lets me get one on one time with each of them! Here are my 4 tips for running successful recorder centers:

1.    Quiet centers are important

Obviously, recorders can get loud, and noise is one of the biggest obstacles to overcome when teaching recorder.  Out of my 4 centers, I try to have at least 1 be a quiet center, or at least 2 be semi quiet centers (centers where students will only play for part of the time they’re there). I also try to place these quieter centers between louder centers physically to disperse the sound around the room more.

Some ideas for quiet centers:

·         Listening centers

·         Composing centers (I love using Roll to Compose!)

·         Worksheets (Colour by Note can be a fun one, or use a seasonal worksheet for some assessment!)

2.   Use technology to your advantage

I’m not lucky enough to teach in a school with 1 to 1 devices for students, so centers are my opportunity to bring tech into the music classroom. With one device you can do a listening center or recorder games on a website like MusicPlayOnline, with one device for each person in your center group you can have students record themselves playing and either assess them yourself, or have them do some self assessment of their recording!

3.     Get assessment time!

Speaking of assessment, centers are my favourite way to get 1 on 1 assessment time with kids. Almost always I have one of my centers be an individual playing center so students can test for recorder karate belts with me. I also like using some sort of written assessment (like a note naming worksheet) in at least one other center each rotation as it keeps kids more accountable and on task.

4.      Practice solo practice

I always have a solo practice center as one of the centers in my rotation – it’s a great place for students to get experience with practicing on their own for short periods of time. To make this the most successful, make sure you go over practice strategies when you’re working all together in class so kids know HOW to practice on their own!

 

When I run recorder centers, this is my usual layout with the 4 centers in the 4 corners of the room:

Center 1 – Worksheet or Task Cards

Center 2 – Worksheet or Listening Center

Center 3 – Individual Practice

Center 4 – Individual Assessment with Teacher

 

I hope this has given you some tips and tricks to running your recorder centers! I have loads of fun recorder activites that make great centers over on my TPT, so feel free to go check them out for more ideas!