Birthday Week!: Papa Edition

It's birthday week here at londoncasey, where once a year we celebrate the 50% of my family who managed to be born during BIRTHDAY WEEK. It is, I think, exciting for all of us. Next up is my father, Dan. For his birthday he gets a blog about some tykes....


In spite of numerous leaving parties and speeches and class parties and general end of the year-ness, I am still at school. This is because I decided to work for the summer camp. Down in the junior camp ("down" because we're in the basement) we've got a surplus of tykes. On Monday morning we were expecting around 25, but as I was registering they just kept coming and coming and coming. When the dust settled we had 35. Maybe 10 doesn't seem like that big a number, but in terms of tyke corralling, it is significant. Fortunately we've now got six staff people, so it has actually been a pleasure so far this week.

We do, however, have one child who is literally a hand full. When he wants to be he is an absolute sweetheart and I genuinely enjoy working with him. That being said, when he starts acting up there is very little that we can do. Explaining quietly and in a deep voice while making lots of eye contact that throwing things at other children is not okay only makes him laugh. When he gets worked up he starts getting violent as well. This morning, and I don't even remember what set this off, I was holding him back and trying to get him under control. He kicked me, pinched my neck, and bit my hand- all of which I could handle and while it wasn't enjoyable didn't really phase me. Then he bent my glasses and I lost it.

I injure myself often enough that I don't mind some bruises or cuts (I have a foot long self inflicted bruise on my thigh right now from where I accidentally tripped and fell onto a bench in the hall during lunch last week. That was embarrassing. I threw food everywhere. One of the year 1 children came up to me after I had cleaned up and sat down again to tell me not to worry because he had fallen down as well and he was okay now.) But don't touch my glasses.

I felt weirdly exposed with my glasses broken. The right earpiece was bent wide to the side. Nothing was actually broken off but it meant that in order to stay on my head the ear piece needed to be outside my ear rather than behind it. If I looked down, say, to talk to any of the tykes, they slipped down my nose. Linda took the boy away from me immediately after my glasses got bent and I rushed outside to try and get myself under control. I cried. Liz came out and gave me a hug. Chetna came over and gave me a hug. I gulped some air and let myself be led over to the shooting range where the Senior camp was later going to do some archery. So that was cool. I at least managed to hit the target. (And didn't further injure myself like I did the last time I did archery as a 9 year old when I somehow managed to shoot the fletching into my index finger.)

We called the kid's mom and sat him in the room next door away from everyone else. (With the door open so we could still see him.) He calmed down quite a lot once he was by himself and ended up sitting there for over an hour while we waited for someone to come and pick him up. I suspect that being in a dark, empty space was probably a good thing for him- less stimulation. By lunch time he was back to being his charming, smiley self. But we still sent him home. 

I went to an opticians after school and they were able to bend the ear piece back, more or less. They hang behind my ear now but the fit is still looser than I would like it to be and probably now is the time to get a second pair of glasses so that I am not completely bereft if this happens again. 

Um. Happy Birthday, Papa! I understand now why you used to get to annoyed when I went for your glasses as a kid....

The Tykes Have A Summer Holiday

At school we have a summer camp for the tykes. It's actually totally reasonably priced and so we end up with some kids from school, some starting school in the autumn, and some from the area. For this week and the next two I am the head teacher/leader/whatever for the junior camp. It's been great fun.

I kind of keep forgetting that I'm in charge so my two wonderful co-teacher/leader/whatever folks have been a fabulous help. I don't forget in the sense that things don't get done but in the sense that a decision will have to be made like "hey, it's raining and we are scheduled to go to the fountain to go wading...that's not going to work. What should we do instead, Casey?" and I pause for a fraction of a second before thinking "Oh! Right! I'm in charge!"

Camp is pretty unstructured, we've got an activity in the morning, lunch and the great kid switch, and then a trip or activity in the afternoon. It's relaxed and focused on having fun. That being said, I'm so pleased that Linda and Lydia are my assistants the first week because they've got so many excellent ideas and it's great to have such wonderful people to get my sea legs with. Here are some things I've learned so far:

1. Free play time is great, but make sure the supplies and activities available for free play vary each day, otherwise the tykes'll get bored. Even the most fun activities are less fun when they are always there.

2. Tykes enjoy some structure. For instance- the obstacle course we built inside during the rain storm was great fun for about half an hour at which point there needed to be a change- the tykes were going from happy to manic and that's not fun to be around nor to experience yourself. We switched to circle games like duck duck goose and The Farmer in the Dell and that allowed us to extend the activity another half hour. Very good to know and learn for scheduling purposes.

3. Just because the schedule you inherited had lunch at 11am, that doesn't mean it's a good time to have lunch. On Monday the kids a: weren't hungry yet and b: finished lunch so early that we had to tuck another extra activity in there before the moms came to pick the morning kids up. Fortunately we sorted that one out right quick.

4. Songs are an excellent transition activity. And though it is the middle of the summer and muggy as anything- it's always a good time for "5 little snowmen fat" which is the current favourite song amongst this week's tykes. I started singing with the tykes on Tuesday while Linda and Lydia were setting up the cookery activity (yes, "cookery" activity) and it worked so well that I've put it into the schedule.

We made gingerbread men and decorated them. The kids counted the cups of flour, tablespoons of butter, cups of sugar, etc. and then each got a turn to mix the dough with their hands (before the eggs were put in). They rolled the dough and cut the cookies out. It was very successful. We didn't have any proper measure cups/spoons/weights so we were eyeballing the dough and estimating everything. Linda was shaking the powdered ginger in and, because everything reminds me of a song, I started singing "shake shake shake, shake shake shake, shake the ginger, shake the ginger" At about the same time as the tykes started singing along I suddenly realized that the actual song was "Shake Your Booty" by KC and the Sunshine band and maybe that wasn't wholly appropriate...

Today we made paper plate masks and painted them and sprinkled them with glitter. I probably sang something during that too, but I don't remember.

Orff Workshop

This weekend I was lucky enough to be sent to an Orff workshop down in Richmond. Orff Shulwerk is another school of thought surrounding music education. They had a lovely little browsing library and I found a book called Comparing Dalcroze, Orff, and Kodaly by Gilles Comeau. I thought "oh, perfect!" and proceeded to write this whole paragraph down:

"For Jaques Dalcroze and for Orff, rhythm is unquestionably the most important element, the foundation of all musical composition and all artistic works. It is not surprising, then, that they both use physical movement as a basis for music education. In the Orff approach, however, movement is not the only medium of choice; language is also fundamental in learning rhythm, perhaps even more important than movement. Kodaly, however, tended to emphasise the melodic component by developing a pitch discrimination, a melodic ear, and inner hearing. It is not surprising that he favored singing as the preeminent medium for music education."

Now, I don't know how helpful that description is for you, but it was brilliant for me. The workshop was run by a delightful German man named Rodrigo who spent most of the workshop being both incredibly silly and incredibly tactile. (Do German's have a smaller personal bubble than the Brits? I kind of suspect not and blame his lack of one and willingness to invade others' on his Portuguese background.) We learned a number songs from around the world and he did an excellent job of teaching us the songs in small and fun steps so that we were playing games and enjoying ourselves, but also repeating the songs again and again and again without getting bored.

There was definitely more of an emphasis on words than I've experienced with Dalcroze workshops. That being said, it wasn't always easy to remember the words since the songs we sang were from Taiwan, Tanzania, Japan, and Germany. (And the German one was in nonsense words! But German nonsense words...)

One of the things that I really liked was that three of the five songs we learned were singing/dancing games. So that the movement was definitely tied to the rhythm, but also tied to specific group movements that meant that if you got it *wrong* well, you knew.

In Dalcroze one of the exercises that you do is called a "follow" and you move about the room in a manner dictated by what you hear from the piano. Say, for instance the teacher is trying to get everyone to walk around the room to consistent quarter notes. The only thing that is helping you to know if you are absolutely dead on or not is the sound of every one's feet. If you hear one big CLOMP! then it's all good, if you hear cloclclocclclomp....then you're not together as a group. Eventually you feel it in your body and through this method you develop a very secure sense of pulse and inner rhythm.

In contrast- this weekend what we were doing was playing games that involved rhythm: our Taiwanese song eventually involved two pairs of partners with sticks sitting perpendicular to each other and tapping them on the ground and slamming them together in a specific rhythmic pattern. The sticks made a hash sign that opened and closed as the rhythm went around. There was also a dancer that had to put their foot in and out of the opening and closing square in the middle of the sticks and then make their way gracefully across the square while stepping at specific times dictated by the rhythm. It was a lot of fun and if you got it wrong your foot was caught in a bunch of sticks (fortunately made out of lightweight plastic, not painful) so you knew you got it wrong. I don't know how much that helps if you haven't already got a pretty sound sense of rhythm, but it was a great dance/game; a lot of fun.

One of the other things that I really enjoyed was that any time we were dancing, or doing some sort of complicated body percussion, or playing on the xylophones and other instruments: we had to keep singing the song. This meant that one or the other aspect (singing or rhythm) had to be solid enough to you could put it on autopilot while focusing on the other aspect. At least, that's how I dealt with the complicated multitasking issue....

Lots of fun, lots of good and useful ideas, and if you even mention in passing a Japanese clapping song game about making Mochi I will force you to learn it and play it with me because I *love* it.

Ps. Yes, it's the same Orff as Carmina Burana. I love that man.

Yoga Class: Bragging Again

I'm not good at this pose. I have a lot of trouble with it. Normally I can catch my ankles, and if I'm doing really well that day I can catch the outside of my feet and then hover at 60 degree angle over my legs.

But today? Today my yoga teacher turned the lights off, had us close our eyes, and just relax into the pose. Something about the environment or the prep that we had done throughout the class or just how my body was today meant that I just melted. I kept realizing that I had just a little bit more, so I would shift and...melt. It wasn't a strain or anything, I mean, definitely a stretch, but not a strain. And then I felt my bangs brushing against my knees and realized that if I just flexed my feet then I would be able to... just a little bit farther...and there! There! My forehead touched my knees and then rested there. My hands were still wrapped around my feet, not out on the floor like that guy, but the rest of it? That's what I did.

I was so excited that as we came out of pose I whispered "did you see that?!" My yoga teacher thinks it was because I wasn't trying as hard. How very Zen.

I haven't been this psyched during a yoga class since the first time I did a headstand. And this time I didn't even end up breaking my glasses!

Tykes' Teachers Get Assessed

My mid year assessment was meant to have happened weeks ago, but due to a number of reasons(unexpected visiting doctors during "people who help us week" and an instrumental concert) it happened today.

Linda was my assessor and even though I have now been at school for a year (official! I started last year right after spring-term half-term break and half-term break starts next week so I have now done a full and complete year cycle.) I had yet to go through an assessment. Now, Linda and I work together every week- we teach club together on Wednesdays and we've done quite a lot of planning for the department together- so Linda ought not to be intimidating. She wasn't really intimidating so much as the concept of being assessed was intimidating. In spite of regularly being told by my co-workers that I am doing a good job, I am still convinced that I'm due for a talking to at any. moment.

I had filled out an Official Lesson Plan form with things like "Key Learning Intentions (WALT)" ... and "Plenary" .... I think this is one of those places where if I actually had teacher training I would know what these things meant. As it was I listed what concepts we were covering and how we would review the songs at the end of the class.

The lesson went well. We worked on Staccato (short and discrete) and Legato (connected) in the form of Frogs and Snakes as well as continuing work on our "Do You Know The Story" song.

We've already listened to staccato sounds and jumped like frogs on the down beat, and last week we listened to legato sounds and moved our hands like undulating snakes. This week I introduced the idea of using our voices like Frogs and Snakes (super short, barking out each syllable individually or completely slurred together). We started by repeating the names of our teachers in the style of whichever laminated picture I was holding up that we we were working on and then moved on to repeating all the tykes' names in that manner as well.

Following all that we reviewed "Do You Know The Story" and tried out writing and singing some new verses. Then we sang the verses with "frog" (staccato) voices and "snake" (legato) voices.

So there you go. There were some warm up and ending things as well- but pretty much- that is what the meat of one of my lessons looks like. The kids did a very good job with the staccato/legato contrast and though I really should have set up the writing of new verses in a different way a couple of lessons ago- they still came up with some interesting and fun verses today as well. Mostly about Power Rangers.

Part of the assessment is immediately sitting down with your assessor and talking about how the lesson went. There is also a written portion that Linda gets to write up tonight. She said that I had an exciting and engaging manner with the kids and I that I was very clear with both what I was doing and with what I wanted the tykes to do. Also that the lesson plan was excellent. (Woo!) She said these things a couple of times and a couple of different ways and I'm sure my facial expressions were concerning her but I couldn't relax until I got to hear what I needed to work on. (Casey! Relax!)

What I need to work on is classroom management- I'm very positive with the tykes- praising good behavior and pointing out kids who are correctly modeling what I'm looking for, but I need to gain more confidence and the authority or presence or whatever that is that means that the kids do what I ask them to the first time I ask them. Also- the teachers in the classroom. A lot of the time a considerable amount of noise is coming from the classroom teachers or assistants who use my class as an opportunity to catch up on things around the room like typing, tutoring one of the tykes (seriously?), chatting with the other teachers, microwaving the tykes' lunches, and today: stuffing a bunch of plastic bags into another plastic bag. (The bags were so loud that I actually did ask her to stop, which was fine, but everything else? Not so much.)

The other thing I need to work on is Plenary (apparently the final section of a traditional three part lesson...huh. I still don't know what WALT stands for.) And Linda and I are going to continue to work on that. We came up with some good ideas that might help both issues- namely small group work and giving creative or quizzing tasks to pairs of tykes. So all in all? Good.

YOGA

I love my yoga class. With a maximum of four people, it is always so intimate and filled with personal attention.

Things I have learned- I've been doing triangle poses wrong for...going on nine years now. Basically you stand with your feet apart and your arms out at shoulder height, then reach one arm out over your front foot as far as you can, fold over, and rest your hand on your knee or shin or whatever. "Rest" was where I've always gotten that wrong because I really do just support my whole body weight on my hand there and it's not so very hard. What is actually supposed to be happening, however, is that your abs are both folded and holding you up. This is so very hard. My core aches today.

The other thing I learned this week is that I LOVE and adore arm balancing postures. Okay, I knew that already, but we did a new one on Tuesday and it involved hooking a foot around one arm, blancing on your hands, and then extending the other leg back behind you. And I did it! (This is pride right here. The whole point of this post is to be all "look at how cool I am!" and brag about the types of poses that come easily to me. Notice I'm not saying anything about forward seated folds because I am rubbish at them. But arm balancing? Looks impressive as all get out and works well for me.)Also I think it is cool how well you can feel your body's weight when all of it is resting on your elbows.

Singing Lesson

I had my first singing lesson with Jilly today. (That's Ella's mum for those of you who don't know.) It was super fun and excellent. We are working on using my voice properly and freeing it really, making sure that I can make a big, relaxed sound so that when I'm teaching my tykes I can model good singing habits. We geared the lesson specifically towards my teaching which was great because it immediately felt useful. This did mean, however, that I spent the majority of the lesson sitting on the floor (learn how you mean to use the skill, right?)

The mechanics of singing are just fascinating- we worked with relaxing my jaw and accessing different parts of my voice and different techniques to bypass various physical and mental blocks. The muscles involved are, for the most part, small and not readily visible (what with being down your throat) so they way that you teach and learn singing is basically by metaphor (and then, of course, by the sound that you manage to produce.)By the end of the lesson my voice was HUGE. And I'm not going to lie: I'm pretty pleased with that. At this point what I feel I most need to get a handle on is breathing and how to do that properly and efficiently. We're having another lesson next month when she comes back down to London again. I'm looking forward to it.

Learning Going On Everywhere

Things I have learned from doing the nativity play and carol sings:

1. Make rehearsal CDs. Make them early. Have the track list on a USB drive in case anyone loses their copy of the CD. Make my *own* copy of the CD so that I don't need to keep borrowing classroom copies.

2. Learn to play the piano! My gosh, all of this would be *so* much easier if I could play the piano instead of relying on CDs (which keep getting lost/scratched/etc.) and/or hoping that Linda is available for rehearsals.

3. It is important to have the set lists early on so that we can see in what ways the songs need to be edited- is the key too high? Too low? Are the words too complicated? Are the words so simple that the tykes get bored singing halfway through the song and trail off before staring into space? This is good to know before the show!

4. Actions for every part of the song (don't leave one verse with the tykes just standing there because you couldn't think of a good action for "shepherds"). Simple is better. Reinforcing the lyrics is best. Sure, let the kids help out with the actions- but only one action per line- that's how it will end up anyway and doing too many just confuses the issue.

5. Sort out the choreography of leading- are the teachers doing everything? Am I doing everything? Either I need to get out of the way and the teachers need a chance to practice the whole group standing up bits or I need to know when each and every kid has their line so that I can cue and prompt when necessary. Again- figure this out early on! And ask the teachers what they would prefer! Having the classroom teachers totally on board is both polite and necessary.

That's what I've got off the top of my head right now, I'm sure there is more that I'm currently forgetting...

Things I learned on Sunday

Sunday was the first of the Christmas concerts with the Kids singing "Snowflake Serenade" at the beginning of the music service recital. The concert was in Christchurch about a five minute walk from Gloucester road. (I think I have found where I want to live when I have buckets and buckets of money- there is a mews behind the church that is full of charming and cute little houses with large planters and pots outside just about every door and climbing plants growing up the fronts of the buildings. It was just beautiful; especially as since it is Christmas time the whole road was lit up with fairy lights as well.) The church was lovely but very cold. All the teachers got there at 1pm to have a staff meeting before the students started trailing in to practice with their accompanists.

The meeting was a little bit silly- it is a new organization and while things are generally going well there is more that the org would like to do and expand upon- which is all well and good. A chamber music programme *would* be a great addition to the offerings, as would composition workshops. Absolutely.

But here's the thing- one of the things that I learned during my IPE rehearsals this summer was that if I was prepared with a number of possible ideas for how a portion of the piece could go then things went swimmingly- even if the devising process left my ideas in the dust. The important part was to have an *idea* of a solution (if, as the director, I couldn't think of a way to make it work, isn't it a bit presumptuous to think that other people are going to take the problem and run with it? Okay- sometimes that was exactly what was needed because I was beating my head against a brick wall and needed help- but that's not what I'm talking about- this is more at the beginning of the process.)

For instance say I wanted a story to be told through a piece of music. And presented it to my group exactly like that: "hey guys! Lets put a story to music! So...what story do you want to do?" It's awfully open ended, and totally not helpful. They may completely agree with me that putting a story to music is brilliant, what a fabulous idea! But I, as director, am going to need to put a little bit more in to it. A lot more in to it. "Hey, lets try little red riding hood with the oboe as the main character- do you think we could have a recurring bassoon part for the wolf? Maybe based a little bit on the wolf theme from Peter and the Wolf and oh! Hey! Maybe we could do a whole concert of pieces based on stories with wolves and use that as our common thread through the whole evening...." etc.

Yeah, a chamber music program is a great idea, but during this meeting we're not going to be able to organize that and figure out all the logistics and think of who should play with who and blah blah blah.

Here's how, in retrospect, I would have run that portion of the meeting (oh, it dragged on so!):

"We think a chamber music option would be great to have at the school- any first thoughts?"
(five minutes of discussion)
"So it sounds like using the students current lesson times isn't going to work for a number of reasons including disrupting already short lesson times, matching up groups of the same level who are having lessons at the same time, and figuring out how the payment works. What about if we tried having chamber music taster sessions to see if the students and parents are interested?"
(five minutes of discussion)
"Am I correct in understanding that most of you think Sunday would be a good day to do this? Is there anyone who is particularly interested or particularly not interested in joining in with this idea/plan?"
(raised hands or around the circle- 2 minutes)
"Wonderful then the four of us who are gung ho- lets be in touch via email about specific dates. Next on the agenda is..."h

See? streamlined! Repeating and clarifying the key points! Creating a sub-committee!

Anyhow- this morning I wrote a list of "things that I have learned about Kid's Christmas Recitals"

1. If it is in a church, dress you child in a turtleneck. Old stone churches are hard to heat and they get *cold.*
2. Kids in choirs are cute. Kids in choirs with over sized Santa hats are cuter still!
3. Treats and tastiness are a great idea for the interval. (And children drink mulled wine in the UK? Isn't it...alcoholic? I guess the cooking takes care of that?)
4. Two hours is far too long for a children's recital.
5. Sketch books are useful for keeping multiple teachers/tutors entertained
6. Question: is it alright to tell of other people's children when a: the child is noisily and repetitively interrupting the concert and b: the parent is doing nothing about it?
7. For those of you who ever messed up in a recital: no one minds- we're all just so proud of you for even getting up there.

It was really nice to spend some time with the rest of the tutors. They are all lovely people and since we never have a chance really to speak while we're teaching- it was particularly nice to get a chance to just hang out a little bit.

One of my favorite Kids is moving back to France after Christmas so this week is the last time I get to see him. Fortunately his parents and two little sisters were helping out with the treats and tastiness so I was able to spend a bunch of time talking to them as well. It was a bit of a mutual appreciation society: "Oh! M. just loves your class! Talks about it all the time!" "Well M. is such a good singer and he catches on to concepts so quickly! He concentrates hard and he's a joy to have in class, I'll miss him!" etc.

All in all a good experience.