- Voices in Movement – Tracy Wong
- Advocacy and Change Making – Deb Brydon & Debbie O’Shea
- Pedagogically Friendly Games: Empowering students through sequential learning – Deborah Smith
- Sweet Potatoes: contemporary gems by female songwriters and musical connections to the past – Michael McGrath
- Emotionally Responsive Teaching in the Early Childhood Classroom – Tammy Kilpatrick
- Enhancing Language Skills through Music – Ebony Birch-Hanger
Session 4
Session 4 Day 4
14:05 - 15:00
14:05 - 15:00
We will explore various movement-based choral warm ups / exercises that build independence and musicality within a choral ensemble, while supporting the singing voice. This will be applied to a few choral pieces of varied styles that feature movement and body percussion.
Come dressed comfortably, ready to move!
Advocacy in its simplest form is about speaking up. It is about making change and being an active participant in this change. As Music Educators, we all need to engage in advocacy for the children we teach to maintain and grow the opportunities they have to be music makers and music learners.
Deb & Debbie will share about the advocacy they have engaged in over the last few years including the very successful Music For Every Child Every Week campaign to reinstate music education in all state schools in Queensland; Together Sing and school based advocacy to raise the profile of First Nations histories and cultures within their schools. They will also discuss opportunities for you to advocate in your own context as well as on a wider scale. Together we are stronger. Deb & Debbie will share about some of their collaborations, the way they work together and with others and the importance of communication, collaboration and relationships.
This will not just be a lecture! You will participate in discussions and begin or build on your own planning for advocacy in your context. Being a change agent is exciting and rewarding and vital in our context of Music Education.
In this interactive pedagogical workshop, Deb will take participants through a selection of brand new games/action sets written specifically for this conference, including some using repertoire by First Nations artists. Together, we’ll work through how teachers can use practical games and activities as part of a sequential, developmental music literacy program to empower upper primary/secondary students. Join Deb to ensure your students really know musical concepts and elements – and have the skills to go on teaching, learning and creating themselves – and while you’re at it, gain resources you can take straight from conference to classroom.
Artists such as Adele, Dua Lipa and Taylor Swift have had a profound impact on the contemporary music scene, being some of the most recognisable names in popular music. Within an aural-vocal-based context, we’ll dig deep into the repertoire, exploring musical connections between contemporary popular songs and art music from the past. As we explore these connections, we’ll consider how repertoire might be used to support the sequential development of musicianship in the secondary classroom.
Music by its very nature can calm or excite the listener. Children’s songs and rhymes hold a treasure trove of emotions. They inherently provide a source of regulation and a vehicle for school readiness, as well as conscious learning. Many of the songs and rhymes used by educators in the early childhood classroom possess these qualities. The beauty of these masterpieces lies in their playful attributes.
There is something very special about Kodály-inspired teaching. The art of the teaching sequence and the carefully guided discovery is a passion for many teachers, including me! The choice, ordering and length of activities in a lesson can impact student engagement and learning however, and it is up to the teacher to plan and teach with flexibility in mind. Selecting repertoire and crafting lessons with playful interactions and opportunities to focus, excite and calm students will provide teachers with a palette of colours to create a lesson that is both artful and child-centred.
This session will focus on repertoire suitable for 3–8-year-olds. It will feature songs, rhymes, and recordings to add to your collection, or use in new ways in response to the children in your care, including those with diverse needs.
Music is one of the strongest tools we can use to develop language. This interactive workshop will provide you with lots of songs and activities that you can use to extend students’ vocabularies, develop an understanding of syllables and develop language structure. All activities are either suitable for, or can be adapted for, students who are neurodivergent or from ESL and low-socioeconomic backgrounds, including students who are non-speaking or use alternative/augmented forms of communication. There will also be opportunities within some of the activities to highlight rhythmic and melodic elements with your students. No student will be left out in your music classroom!