During student teaching, I discovered
the challenge of assessment in the elementary general music
classroom. Assessment is a struggle because there are so
many students and so little time. I see every student in
the building one hour a week and it is hard to get all that I
want to get accomplished in a short amount of time. I
constantly use informal assessment to see which students are
grasping concepts and to see which students still are
struggling with concepts. I informally assess students
playing, singing, and moving. I also informally assess
students through questioning. I have learned the
importance of questioning within the Composer of the Month
activities. I usually have student review what we have
already learned about the composer and then add to that
information each day. I informally assess students
during group activities. The link below is video clip of
5th grade students clapping 16th note rhythm patterns that
they created. Scroll down to the second movie
clip. (You can view this clip with Quicktime or Media
Player.) From this quick assessment I could see that
some students were grasping this concept of 16th notes and
some students were definitely struggling with it. As an
educator, I know that I need to visit this rhythmic concept in
the future lesson.
Video clip of 5th graders clapping
rhythms
I also did an
informal singing assessment with my Kindergarten
classes. I used a song and game called "My Elephant Pat"
to informally assess each student singing individually.
I was informally assessing if they could sing on pitch.
I think that it is very important to get students singing as a
group and by themselves as early as possible. It is
important to remind students that it is not appropriate to
make any comments while someone else is singing because it
could hurt their feelings.
Pictures of Kindergarten students singing and
playing this game
During my composition unit I
was able to assess the musical notation skills of my
students. Third grade student worked with the poem
Chipmunk, Chipmunk. The fourth and fifth grade students
used the poem Diddle, Diddle Dumpling. Each student created a
musical composition for one line of the poem. They then
wrote the letter name of the note above the rhythm. Each
student was given a sheet of staff paper where they had to
write their composition out in musical notation. I then
collected both of these sheets and graded them. This
assignment was worth 8 points. 4 points were for the
having the correct rhythm and 4 points were for putting the
correct notes according to what the student decided on the
page with just the rhythm above the
words.
Student Composition - 3rd
Grade
I also did a formal singing
assessment with my first grade students. We learned the
song "Who has the button?" and then played a game to go
along with this song. In the game each student had an
opportunity to sing. I was then able to write on the
seating chart if the student was right on pitch. If they
were too high I put an arrow going up, too low I put an arrow
going down, or if they used their speaking voice rather than
singing voice I would write an ìspî next to their name.
It was a quick and easy way to assess students and they did
not really even know that they were being
assessed.
Seating charts used to record this assessment
game |
