What's New in Musicplay with Denise Gagne

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Blog Posts (14)

Classroom Management Tips

One of the biggest challenges every teacher faces is classroom management.  Your most challenging class might be a kindergarten class with many behavior challenges or it might be a Grade 5 class with attitude.  In this newsletter, I’m sharing some tips that have helped me with classroom management.

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Elementary Choral Music

Finding music for your elementary choir that will be a wonderful musical experience for the students, good performance piece for concerts, challenging but not too difficult, is always hard and takes a lot of time! In this newsletter, I want to highlight some of the pieces that I've used with Grade 3-5 choirs that has worked well for me. Where possible I've included YouTube links, because seeing a choir perform a piece well can be helpful in choosing material for your choirs.

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Focus and Fun for Your Choir

I got an email this week: I am looking for some game/ activities I can use for a choir grade 1-6 ( together) that will be interesting and hold the students attention. I am subbing and lesson plans are thin. So I was wondering if you could suggest something. Thank you G

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Best Fundraising Idea Ever!

The best fundraiser that I’ve ever done was to make school Christmas CDs. We recorded each class singing one song, compiled it onto a CD and sold it to parents for $15. It was a great gift for grandparents --- many parents bought 3 CDs so they could keep one and give 2 as gifts. I still have parents who tell me that they listen to this CD (and the tapes before them) each Christmas --- and the first one that I recorded was more than 20 years ago. Just this week at a community fundraiser, a parent of a student I taught in the early 1990's told me they'd just come across the CD and how many memories it brought back.

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