April showers bring May flowers, but it also brings state testing. Everyone in your school, from teachers to students to support staff, don’t enjoy this week. It’s exhausting and draining, but just one of those things that has to be done.
You’ve probably heard phrases as the music teacher before like, “can you please keep the kids quiet in the music room” or “why don’t you just show a video” during testing week. If this sounds like something you’ve heard, you’re not alone. Of course, that is easier said than done and you’re probably thinking “you want me to keep the kids quiet in the music room? Have you met these kids?” But, I want to encourage you that there are many lesson ideas you can do during that week that won’t distract others or have your students feeling even more drained, and in this blog post (and in this podcast episode) we’re going to explore what to do during testing week in music class.
Outside lesson ideas
If it’s nice weather, go outside to teach music. This honestly isn’t as overwhelming as it sounds. I promise.
Simple activities with your lower grades can simply be listening to the outside noises and identify the sounds. For example, if they hear a bird, talk about the tempo, dynamics, and pitches they hear. Sometimes, students may not even realize music is all around them in nature. Another great outside activity you can do is bring paper and pencils outside and do writing activities about sounds. They can compare and contrast sounds or even draw a picture of what they heard.
If you’d rather do a game, try a musical relay race. You’ll play a song and students have to move to the steady beat to their next team mate. They can skip, lunge, hop, or dance to their partner to the beat. Another fun game is instrument 4 corners, which you can read more about here. Basically, you assign 4 corners for each instrument family and after you call out an instrument, they run to the corner of the family that instrument belongs to. Then, you keep going until there’s a winner.
But of course, you can definitely always do movement activities. Folk dances are fun to do inside or outside. Even if you can’t bring music outside, your students can sing the song and still practice the dance. They’ll seriously have so much fun doing this outside and have more room to move. There are also other movement ideas you can bring outside that you can read about here.
Inside lesson ideas
I mentioned doing movement activities outside, but there are ways you can still teach movement even when needing to keep your students quiet. First of all, just keep the volume of the music down. It’s actually kind of fun doing creative movement activities while telling your students to tip toe and to not use their voices at all. Use scarves to explore the way their bodies move and play slow music.
A great music integration activity (like I mentioned in this blog post) is to simply read to your students. You can just simply read to them, or they can listen to books like “Pete the Cat” or any of the other books I recommend here. Besides just reading the books to the students, they can move to different words you read, pat the beat, or snap to the rhythm you’re reading.
Another great inside lesson is to hand out old fashioned staff paper and do composing activities, whether they’re writing rhythms or melodies. There’s also a lot of great word search activities or papers all about composers or other worksheets along those lines.
Then, the last idea I want to mention, is to do music games like rhythm bingo. This is an activity that can keep the kids quiet, but they are definitely still learning music as well. There are also several other music games you can do too.
What do you do during testing week in your classroom? I’d love to hear all about it in the comments below or share your thoughts on social media as you share this post.
Also, I’d love for you to share this post or any of the resources on my website with a friend or colleague who you know NEEDS to see it.
P.S. Are you feeling frustrated or stuck as an elementary music teacher? Check out these free resources to help you teach elementary music with confidence!
During testing week, I include more movement for sure! I try to keep things consistent with our learning, but I won’t push them quite as hard and let them focus and the joy of learning. If they have a test right after music, we’ll do some slow moving to a classical piece at the end of class (which is shown to increase focus).