Transition Songs!

Exciting news! Today I found a blog from a teacher who is just as excited about using music for transitions as I am! For those of you who have no idea what I'm so excited about, let me digress. One of my teacher idols, who has many fabulous ideas, had one particularly fabulous idea to use music as a signal to students to transition to another activity or subject. She chose a few songs (lots of Creedence Clearwater Revival. I was a fan.) and when students heard the song, they knew it was either time to put things away and move to the carpet, to clean up for lunch, to get ready for the day, etc.

One of my least favorite things in my main placement is our transitions during the day. We usually do a count down and by the time we get to 1, students should be seated at the carpet, or wherever our next lesson will take place. It actually takes a lot of effort that I, as a student teacher, could use that time getting set up for my next big lesson. Every second counts! So I've been doing a lot of reflecting on how I could make this better and improve on what method we already have for transitions throughout the school day.

So I am ridiculously excited that I found this blog from a teacher who uses music in her class transitions- oh, and did I mention she uses her SMART BOARD to do all this?

I am just downright impressed. This is going on my list of things to do when I get my own classroom. With the exception of the song list. Maybe I could have students help me choose the songs and we could have a collective class list of music. I'll admit though, I will draw the line at any Miley Cyrus songs because 1) Copyright infringement, and 2) those songs are way too catchy and they would get stuck in my head immediately. This idea is a work in progress!