S1: E23 Part I Orff, Kodaly and Recorders with Darla Meek

Season One: Episode 23
Part I - Darla Meek on the Orff and Kodaly approaches and using recorder in the elementary classroom

 

Darla Meek is the Music Education Coordinator and Lecturer at Texas A&M University in Commerce.  She teacher undergraduate and graduate elementary music education classes and supervises student teachers.  She earned her Bachelor of Music Education from Dallas Baptist University and her Master of Music from Southern Methodist University.  Darla also earned a Performer's Certificate from the Performing Artist's Musical Theatre Conservatory in Dallas.  She is currently working towards her Doctor of Education in Supervision, Curriculum, and Instruction.

Darla is certified in Kodály and Orff Schulwerk and serves as a teacher trainer for the American Orff Schulwerk Association in both Basic Pedagogy I and Movement for Orff Levels Courses.  She has served as assistant conductor for the Mesquite Children's Chorus and the Children's Chorus of Collin County and has served as Children's Choir Coordinator for three churches in the Dallas area.

Darla has written children's choir curricula for Lifeway Christian Resources and Celebrating Grace Inc.  Her recorder method books Journey Around the Globe with Recorder and Flight 2: Another Journey Around the Globe with Recorder were published by Sweet Pipes, Inc.  Her resource for church musicians All Things Bright and Beautiful is available through Chorister's Guild.

She is a member of AOSA, OAKE, KET, TCDA, TMEA, Dalcroze Society of America, the College Music Society, and NAfME.  She is a past President of the North Texas Chapter of AOSA.  Darla is married to Keith Meek and has two children - Gregory and Aubrey.

TRANSCRIPT OF THE SHOW

Jessica:  Darla, thanks so much for talking.

Darla:  Oh, it's my pleasure.

Jessica:  I would love to know how you became a music educator and if you knew that you wanted to do music.

Darla:  Uh, not at all.  I was not planning on teaching at all.  I was a performance major.  My mother and my boyfriend, at the time, encouraged me to change my degree to education just in case.  You know, to have something to fall back on or whatever, but I still never intended to teach and if I did end up teaching, it would be high school kids.  I didn't have any experience with young children and I just didn't think that would be something that I would enjoy doing.  So I did my secondary student teaching first and I had this wonderful mentor.  He really allowed me to use whatever I wanted to do and he gave me an entire class to work with all by myself.  And I started making up games for them to play and I even brought in movement so even at that time I saw in myself that I preferred to spend my day doing a lot of activities besides just sing and that I liked to approach vocal pieces with lots of other avenues.

So then I went to my elementary rotation and I was just absolutely astonished.  Now I have to back up here and tell you that I didn't have an elementary methods course to speak of in college.  At the time in the school I went to, we did education courses.  We did music courses, but elementary methods?  No.  So I had no training whatsoever.  It was totally on the job learning so everything about elementary music intrigued me.  I loved the fusion of all the different resources to teach the concepts.  So that was a long six weeks.  Thought I've never been so tired in my life.  I was really quite physically fit, but I would come home exhausted every day.  I'd walk in the door - face plant on the couch.  Bam!  Like a corpse.  Until dinner.  Then I would eat and then fret for hours for the next day and get up the next day and do it again.  Sounds like your life, right?

Jessica:  Yes.  Yes!  It sounds like a music educator's life!

Darla:  Yes exactly.  So the turning point for me was the very first time I taught a little finger play to a group of kindergartners and it was so fun.  And when it was done, I got them up to line up and they just grabbed me in this big group hug like kindergartners do.  And that was it!  I was in love.  And I thought if I ever teach, it's going to be this age.  But I still wasn't ready to teach.  I knew I didn't know enough.  You know, just six weeks in a student teaching situation is not enough and not having a methods course is a real handicap so it just showed me how much I didn't know.  Plus I still wanted to perform so I graduated and attended a performing artist's musical theater conservatory for two years in Dallas which was really cool. After that I started auditioning for shows and commercials and industrials and working at Casual Corner.  I don't even know if you know what that is.

Jessica:  I do.  Yes.

Darla:  Dress Shop.

Jessica:  Yes.

Darla:  To bring a little income in.  And my husband was and still is a freelance musician and a teacher so you can imagine we were not living high on the hog at that point, right?  So one day I went to a Sunday School picnic at - I belonged to a church in Mesquite, Texas - and a group of women, we were sitting around talking and one teacher was there from Forney, which is kind of next door to Mesquite, and she mentioned that they were looking for a music teacher because, get this, they had no conference period....

Jessica:  ooohhh...

Darla:  ...at their school.  So I jokingly said, 'Maybe I should go interview...hahaha.'  And she looked at me and she said, 'What do you mean?  Are you a music teacher?'  And I said, 'No, but I have a music degree.'  She said, 'Are you a certified teacher?'  I said, 'Yes.'  She's like, 'Please!  Please go interview!  We're about to slit our wrists.'  That's a quote - so she would not leave me alone until I went to interview.  So I said, 'Okay.  I'll just go interview and then maybe that'll make her leave me alone.'  So I made arrangements and I went in.  And I was sitting in this room with the principal and this group of teachers and as we were talking I started to get excited about the possibility of working with children again, but also this school wanted a music educator who would be an integral part of the education community and work hand in hand with the generalists, helping them develop their units of study.  And that has always intrigued me because this is the kind of teacher that I grew up with watching my mother.  My mother was an incredible teacher.  Thirty years.  Very gifted.  She was hampered by her health and because of her health, I was her right-hand girl as far back as I can remember and so I helped her every day before and after school.  Went to workshops with her.  Seminars with her.  Bounced ideas off each other.  You know.  So I've always had a passion for aiding the general ed teacher with their lessons and showing them how to enliven and enrich their lessons with the arts.

So anyway, after that, the principal sent me over to talk to the Superintendent.  And I remember walking in and sitting in his dark, gloomy office and he was talking about benefits and packages and stuff and I didn't understand a word of what he was saying to me.  And then he asked me to return to the elementary school to sign a contract and I was so green I didn't even know what a contract was.  So I shook his hand and went out the door and I found a phone and I called my mother.  She said, 'Darla, that means you've been hired.  You need to sign the contract.'  But I said, 'Momma, I don't know anything about teaching!'  And she said, 'You get over there and you sign the contract.  You will learn as you go.'  And she was right.  She was right.  It was very slow going and very hard because I had a textbook, a record player, and a few unpitched percussion instruments.  And that's it.  And my classroom was part of the library.  So they had library classes on one half and I was doing music classes on the other half.  It was crazy!  But I taught there for four years and they turned out to be really wonderful years.  And birthed two children during that time so I resigned and stayed home for a while.  Anyway, so that's how I got started.  I accidentally kind of fell into it and then just learned on the job.

Jessica:  Man.  I feel like it just seems like so many teachers have stories of they were either expecting to do secondary education and they kind of, I'll say, stumbled into elementary or they kind of had education on the side and it was like, 'well, I don't know, you know, if I'm going to do that, but then all of a sudden, here we all end up teaching elementary and loving it and it taking us to places we wouldn't have thought, you know.

Darla:  So true.  That's so funny.

Jessica:  Yeah.  And so what does your work encompass now?

Darla:  Well now I teach elementary music methods at A&M Commerce.  So my undergraduate classes are generally Music and Movement I, which focuses on content for grades K-3, and Music and Movement II, which focuses on grades 3-6.  And my favorite course is Instruments for Elementary Music.  It's a two hour class where the students are introduced to just about any instrument they may want to use in an elementary music classroom.  So we start with a whole unit on body percussion because I believe in training the body first.  And so developing that beautiful, flowing, dance-like body percussion has a direct effect on your playing and your musicianship.  So we do that first and then we move into unpitched percussion and barred instruments, soprano and alto recorder.  We do some West African drumming, Middle Eastern drumming, and they also learn dulcimer, ukulele, and the guitar.  All in a two hour class.  Yeah, it's really fast paced and really fun.

Jessica:  And is that over the course of one semester?

Darla:  Uh-huh.  Yeah.  One semester.  I also teach a course for General Elementary Educators, you know, not musicians called Integrated Arts for Elementary Teachers.  And that's an interesting class because they come to me for five weeks and then they move to theater for five weeks and then they move to art for five weeks.  And then they take a final exam.  So they're simultaneously learning some rudiments about each art form and also how to integrate that art form into their core curriculum so I demonstrate sample lessons.  Integrating music and movement with science and social studies, math, and ELA.  Then they have to create and make their own lessons too and present them for each other.  

And in addition to all my coursework, I serve as the Music Education Coordinator, which means I guide the students through their residencies each semester.  Which is a big job.

Jessica:  That is a big job.  And how many, I mean it probably varies, but how many student teachers are you overseeing at one time?

Darla:  Generally the average is twelve to fifteen.  I've done as few as six in a semester and as many as twenty-three in a semester.  For the first few years I did it all myself.  Going into the field with them and doing the evaluations, but now I have a cadre of field supervisors that are wonderful.  They're retired band directors and choir directors and elementary music teachers and they go out and do that for me so I just supervise them.  And then when the students come back to campus, they come back eight times during the semester for what we call seminar.  And this is where we talk about leadership or assessment or how to interview or work on their resumes or something like that.  I lead those sessions.

Jessica:  Oh what a - I love that idea though of having other people helping guide the students as well because then they're still getting input from you, but then also getting input from the person that they're under and then someone else who's been in the field.

Darla:  That's right.  They have three mentors to help them through the semester.

Jessica:  Yeah.  Oh that's awesome.  I love that.  Having a couple advisors help guiding you.

Darla:  Yes.

ORFF AND KODALY

Jessica:  So along the way you got your certification in both Kodály and Orff approaches so can you kind of talk us through what your experience was like.  Like did you take your levels at the same time?  Or study at the same university?  Or kind of what did those levels courses look like for you?

Darla:  Probably for any novice teachers listening, should we explain a little bit about what a levels course is like?

Jessica:  That'd be great.

Darla:  It's a two week class during the summer.  It begins around 8 in the morning and lasts until about 4 in the afternoon for two weeks.  And then the students travel together between basic pedagogy (this is in Orff) where you learn the content and how to teach it and then they go to movement, which usually involves creative movement and folk dance, and then to recorder class.  Then they do those three segments every day.  And then there's a big sharing event for families and friends the last day of the course.  And once you've gone through three levels - you do one per summer - so then you are certified.

So then Kodály.  The very first day, it's very different from Orff, the first day the students are administered an ear training test and they're placed into groups according to ability.  So the students move between musicianship, which is ear training, and basic pedagogy and conducting and folk music.  The third year they get to compile this massive song collection, which involves analyzing songs and creating master copies, which is a very detailed and specific way of archiving your songs. And then you categorize them in lots of different ways.

So as far as my personal experience, I took my Orff levels first and I remember my husband picking me up from Orff class and when I got into the car I looked at him and I said, "I feel like I've just eaten a huge emotional and spiritual steak dinner with all the wine and hors d'oeuvres, and dessert and cloths and napkins and candles and everything."  Every day was like that.  I was physically exhausted because movement is such a big part of the training, but I experienced that afterglow for months afterward.  And so to this day I walk into that building at SMU and I smell that smell and the endorphins begin firing because it was such a happy time.

Kodály was different.  It appealed to my concrete sequential brain.  I'm very much a linear thinker so the sequence attracted me right away and I loved the idea of the freedom of choice within the boundaries of the scope and sequence.  So even now I structure my methods courses according to the Kodály sequence.  When students leave my classroom, they have a head start on their Kodály levels.  In fact, their class textbook is one of the texts they will use for the Kodály levels.  So I took my Orff levels first and then my Kodály level, I took level one and several years later I took level two and three and finished up.

Jessica:  The two are so complementary.  Or like you said, you've got this freedom and emotional and all the movement and things of Orff, but then that sequential side is so necessary from the Kodaly too.  I love how they merge together.

Darla:  Exactly.

Jessica:  Yeah.  And what do you find are the benefits of having learned both approaches?

Darla:  Oh my goodness.  Well, the more we diversify, the more children we can reach, right?!  You know, our children have various learning styles and they all have their own abilities and gifts and modes of expression so it just makes sense that we should diversify our teaching style so that we can reach them.  And I've found that blending the two together is something that teachers in Texas do really well.  One of the blessings of my job is I have the privilege of going to about 60-70 classrooms and visiting in northeast Texas and I observe a lot of fine teaching that involves a beautiful blend of the two approaches.  So I love to talk to teachers about what are some of the commonalities of the two approaches that makes them work so well together.  Well, they're both experience based.  The music concepts are introduced in basically the same order.  In both, sound comes before symbol, right?!  Making music comes before reading it just like we learned how to speak.  They use predominantly movable do and solfége and the hand signs for melodic development (at least in Texas).  And then for rhythm they use the rhythm syllables at the school for rhythmic development.

They both place high importance on the use of authentic folk music.  They both use the discover method.  They both believe - Kodály and Orff practitioners - believe that both the voice and body should be trained first before instrumental training. And instruments is just an extension of the voice and body.  They both believe that only the very best material should be used.  And of course the goal is the same:  joyful interaction with music and the acquisition of skills.  Lifelong music making.  All that good stuff.  So I find the two complement each other beautifully.

Jessica:  I do too.  And I think the more that we as educators can understand the benefits of both, the more that - I'll say - the Kodály vs. Orff world - it's...I feel like it's starting to merge more as more of us have dabbled with both and integrated both.

Darla:  I completely agree and I'm so happy to see it happen.

Jessica:  Yeah because I think it's needed.  I don't know.  I have so many friends and colleagues who have had training in both sides and the Dalcroze or even the Gordon music and just, I feel like the music world - we're starting to realize that we all have the same goal of educating the child in many ways.  If an educator has yet to take their levels courses, do you have a recommendation of where they should think of starting?

Darla:  Oh my.  So many different opinions about this.  I don't think there is one right answer.  Some would say start with the one where you feel you would be the most comfortable.  Well, I would say start with the one where you feel the most uncomfortable.  So it depends on your personality, how long you've taught, your toleration level for change, I suppose.  What resources you have or your schedule.  What you can afford to do.  So many things.  But I've discovered that a lot of my students went and got their Orff I and Kodály I the same summer.  And then the next summer they went and got II and then the next summer they got III.  That might be a little too much for a lot of people, but they're fully certified in both over three summers.  If you can handle that, go for it.

RECORDER

Jessica:  Right.  Right.  Part of the Orff levels training involves recorder.  You have two really great resources.  One that I'm actually using right now with my fifth graders.  One is called Journey Around the Globe with Recorder and then second resource is called Flight 2:  Another Journey Around the Globe with Recorder.  So how did you design these materials or how did you come up with the concept of the recorder materials?

Darla:  That's another interesting story!  Several years ago at A&M Commerce, they started a global scholar program and it's a distinction that our students can earn by participating in courses with a global component and study and travel abroad.  That kind of thing.  So the faculty was instructed: 'look at your courses and determine if they fit the criteria to be considered a global course.  Or if they could be tweaked to focus on global issues even more.  And so that class that I told you about - Instruments in the Elementary Music - I just said, 'Okay.'  I took out a big file that had all my recorder lessons that I developed myself - because I like to use my own stuff rather than other people's stuff.  And I just spread them out on my desk.  I had this really long desk.  And I put them in the order that I teach them.  

Then I realized almost every single recorder lesson featured music from a different country.  And I thought, 'Oh my gosh - I wonder if this could be a thing.'  So I stacked them up and I put them in a binder and I mailed them to my sweet friends Bob and Laura Bergin with a note that said, 'What do you think of this?'  And about four days later they called and said, 'why don't you come to lunch?'  And then when I got there, we sat down at their table and I discovered that Laura had meticulously gone through every single word and made pages and pages of notes on this yellow pad.  I was so touched that she put so much time into  helping me with my little collection of lessons.  And then they said, 'Can you have this ready in six weeks?'  And I'm like 'What?  Excuse me?'  And so, yeah.  I had a six week deadline to get that into a book format.  Crazy.  Crazy.

So what you've got there is a collection of lessons that worked well for me and my kids that I continued to refine for years even after I started working with adults.  And like I said, I've been in classrooms and I've seen a lot of recorder teaching so it's really interesting what one can learn by being a fly on the wall.  When you're in the back of the room and you're thinking like, 'Ooh.  That worked really well' or 'Hmm - if they would just do that, they might get that result.'  You know what I mean?

Jessica:  Okay.  Yeah.

Darla:  So I turned it in and of course I was given a page limit.  I had so many lessons left over so that's how volume two came about and I'm actually over half way finished with Flight 3: Still Another Journey around the Globe with Recorder.

Jessica:  Ah it's so great.  I always find it's always nice to have lots of options for teaching the same concepts.  Especially with recorder when you're starting with say B-A-G or A-C or G-E.  You know, you could start from any of those three points, but Hot Cross Buns can only - I mean, I can only do that so many times when introducing it to students.  It's nice to have other options for them.  Would there be a way to talk about one of the specific pieces and describe the process you use to teach it?

Darla:  Each lesson uses the recorder in a different way.  One of several ways let's say.  Either the recorder is playing the melody of the song.  Or it may be playing a descant.  Or it might be playing the chord roots.  Or a contrasting section.  But often it's used as a tool for improvisation and composition.

So for example, in Que Lleva which is the second one, they compose a contrasting section to a poem using two notes:  G and E.  Because I start with G and E.  We'll talk about why later.  And then in Yellow Bird they play a simple three note descant using just G, A, and B.  But the barred instrument part is quite a bit more sophisticated, you know, because they've been using barred instruments for years, but they're just starting out on recorder.  And then a couple later - Mongolian Night Song.  They play the melody and they can compose a contrasting section using E-G-A-B.  And a few later: Over My Head, an African-American spiritual.  They sing and play a partner song that goes with the main melody so each lesson they're doing something different with recorder.  

As far as a specific lesson, I really love Doraji, the Korean folk song.  It's in 3 meter, pentatonic, and so we'd start with movement.  I always start with movement.  Moving in three.  Doing some solfége patterns with the tone set.  Moving into the melody.  Just singing the melody by itself and then adding the words.  That's another thing about this book.  Any song that has another song in another language other than English, there is a singable English translation that I've included because I teach it in English first and then I teach it in whatever the native language is so I've just found it an easier way to scaffold their learning.  So then after they've learned the song, it goes through the process of teaching the instrument parts starting with the bass part, the glockenspiel color part, and then there's a recorder part.  And the focus of this lesson is moving between G and F.  Isolating that skill.

So once they have that then there's a movement section where they create choreography with these white stretchy bands so it kind of looks like the movement of the flowers when they're blowing in the wind.  And it just sort of makes for a nice little program piece using a Korean folk song.

Jessica:  It's kind of the way that the Orff and Kodály worlds are, I feel,  merging the more we learn about it.  I feel like for so long and maybe it's just the way that I've used the recorder before, but I feel like it used to be more of like a unit.

Darla:  Yes.

Jessica:  A separate thing and now I feel like it's - we're finally incorporating other instruments and movement and singing and again, it could just be my...

Darla:  Not 

Jessica: ...lesser knowledge that I had with it because it used to be like, 'Okay.  It's March.  Here's my recorder unit for three months and then it's kind of to the side, but now I feel like it's so much easier to incorporate it and I love that not every piece that you have - the recorder isn't always the melody.  There's options for it so it can kind of merge throughout.

Darla:  Yes that's right.  It's so funny that you brought that up because I see it all the time.  Even Orff teachers who have been Orff teachers for years and years - and Kodály teachers - that decide to use recorder, it's interesting that we believe this whole making music before symbols, sound before symbols and that kind of thing, but there's this disconnect when it comes to recorder.  We want to drag in chairs and music stands and method books and say, 'Okay the B.  Now let's play it:  B___ B B.'  That's not the right pitch, but you get the idea.  Right?  Because that's the way I learned it.  Is that the way you learned it?

Jessica:  Yup.  That's the way I learned it.

Darla: Okay so this whole idea of using the recorder as just another instrument for music making, infused into your classroom like singing, barred instruments, moving, everything else, rather than this isolated unit is just this new mind blowing concept.

Jessica:  And I find it's really effective because something I've started doing with my students is when we start class we always start with singing.  Every class.  And then we'll do some kind of body percussion or we'll do some kind of rhythmic piece.  And then I always go to recorder next.  Almost invariably because I find if I don't purposefully put recorder - and it'll merge in other ways the more we've done it - but I find if I don't purposefully put it in, it's an easy one to go 'oh we'll get to that one later.'  If that makes sense.  And so in doing it, by having kind of this sequential part to the lesson, it fits nicely within the Kodaly structure of, you know:

the enter song 

transition 

simple concentration (moderate)

transition 

high concentration

So it's kind of that moderate concentration at the beginning - slightly modified.  But I love that it kind of integrates.  One of the pieces that you have.  It's the Chicago Sunset on page 65 of the first book.  That's a song that I really enjoy doing with students because of all the extension ideas with the chords in G.  Talking about I-IV-V chords and then bringing in the barred instruments. And then it offers up so many improvisation ideas and the melody in there.  I just love that piece.

Darla:  Can you tell a little more about that?  I'm so interested in knowing what you do with it.

Jessica:  Oh okay.  So what I did, and this is the first time I've taught this piece because I've done 12-Bar Blues, but it's typically in the key of C, and I loved the idea of switching it up and doing it in G.  And so we started, I don't know, about two and a half weeks ago, I played the melody for them.  And I had them listen to similar, same, and different because I was talking with Georgia Newlin about her book One Accord and she talked about how same and different are fairly easy for students, but similar is harder and I was like 'I'm going to try and focus more on teaching students to identify the similar and really talking more about that.'  So I played the entire piece for them and we talked about what they heard.  And then I put the notation on the board.  And I made sure it was the four measures - the four-four-four - to line up with the twelve bars.  I just had them look at the common things and the similar things and the different things and then compare it to what they heard.

On the Promethean software when I put it in with the Finale stuff, I put in bars so they could identify where all the same measures were.  Finding all those I chords and like where in measure 3, it changes to like the (singing) G-G E-D G-G E-D  and then that measure four: G-G-E-D G with the rest.  But identifying how that was still the one chord, but it repeated.  And so I actually taught them how to play all the I chord measures.  And then I played the IV and V.  And so the first class we just talked about what they saw and heard and they played around with that, but I found that it was really easy for them to play those because they already knew G-E-D.

And then in the second lesson we did, we talked about measures 5 and 6.  I think it's a IV chord there.

Darla:  I do too.

Jessica:  I know it's C-A-G.  From there we looked at measures 5 and 6 and then we talked about the notes looking different because they were like 'why are the lines going down instead of up?'  And so we talked about how that looks because they still, even in 5th grade with the stems on the notes, to them it still looks like something different.  Which tells me I need to practice more having them read notation with stems down and up.  And so we talked about that.  Then they learned the IV chord and then we put that all together and left out measures 9 and 10.  But then I went to the piano and kind of improvised while they were playing, I would kind of improvise a jazzy, jazzy I and IV chords and V chords and during the V chords, they'd just sing it.  The (singing) D-D-D A, C-C-C G.  I just had them sing that part and then go back to playing the I chord.

And then we went to learning high D because the high D only happens the one time in measure 9.  And so then after we learned measure 9, ms. 10 was pretty easy - they knew C to G.  Then we put the whole thing together.  I played it on the piano and what I want to do now is add movement, now that they've got it pretty familiar in playing, is adding some kind of movement.  Very, very simple movements to it that shows the structure I-IV-V.  And then from the movements we'll put it onto bass bars and chords and playing around with chords to supplement.  We'll probably put it or I'm planning to have them play it in their Music Sharing in three weeks.  So that's how I used it.

Darla:  I would love to see that final performance.

Jessica:  Yeah!  I'll give you the date and if you can't make it, I'll have a recording of it.  There's so many great 12-bar blue resources, but I loved the melody of this one and the idea that it was just the pitches are so great and like that high D - it's not constant throughout the song.  Just through that one measure.  But the students like, love it.  They just kind of jam to it and they'll sing it on - I'll say - scat syllables, but you know (singing bum-bahs...).  They really just, they like to move to it.  So it just fits seamlessly in with integrating recorder all over.  That was a long explanation - sorry!

Darla:  Oh that was great!  I took notes.

Jessica:  You did?  In fact I should share the file with you.  I just created a Google Slide file that I worked with and it's really basic, but it's just what worked for me going, 'Okay here's how I want to teach it' and then color coding.  And then I'll take those color coding things and say all the one's (I) are pink, then when we go to the chords, all the I chords using G-B-D when they learn to improvise with their thirds and fifths will be pink.  So that way it kind of lines up and the students have really, really loved it.

Darla:  Awesome!  You just made my day.

Jessica:  Oh good!  And the other piece I really love was the Sioux Indian Lullaby.  Where did you find that piece - the Sioux Indian Lullaby piece?

Darla:  I learned it when I was a little girl.

Jessica:  You did?

Darla:  Yes.  And I don't remember the source, but I've been singing it.  I sang it to my kids when they were little.  And then I found it somewhere else, but with different words.

Jessica:  Did your mom sing it or did you just learn it in music class?

Darla:  I might have learned it in music class.  I know my mom didn't sing it.  I'm not sure where I picked it up.  It could be on the playground at daycare.  Who knows!

Jessica:  Right.  Oh how neat.  And so do you have advice for teachers who might use that piece because with the changing meter I know you've got some great ideas in there for how we could introduce that to students.

Darla:  Changing meter specifically?  Oh ha - I start with movement.  It's all about movement for me. The basic beat in the feet game that you learn Day 1 Level 1 Orff.  They're moving through the space showing the Strong-Weak, Strong-Weak, right until you change the pattern to Strong-Weak-Weak, Strong-Weak-Weak.   And then back and forth until they have whatever combination it is that I am focusing on.  Cause just about anything they're going to use in the elementary classroom is a combination of two and three, right.  Two pattern and three pattern.  So I just continue working and whatever the new pattern is for a while.  Perhaps using body percussion or maybe a bean bag passing game or choreography or something until they're really comfortable with it before they begin singing or playing an instrument.  Certainly reading notation in that new changing meter.

Jessica:  So I think most teachers see the use and value of having recorders in classrooms, but what do you think or find beneficial about it.

Darla:  Oh goodness. They're legion.  The historical value.  Obviously they're portable.  They're almost as portable as your voice!  They're inexpensive - you're not paying thousands of dollars.  They're easy to learn to play - really just cover holes and blow air.  They're really good for improvisation.  They're the perfect introduction to other wind instruments.  As for me, you can learn to play as your students learn.  That's how I learned.  Just stay a note ahead.

Jessica:  What advice do you have about sharing and working with students and recorders?

Darla:  The year before you start teaching recorder, there's lots of things that you can do to get them ready to play recorder that will keep their tone improving besides the conception of sound of you playing it well.  There's the whole discussion of warm air vs. cool air that I give my very young children because I want them to lift their soft palate when they sing so they have a beautiful tone so they already know how to do that.  But the whole putting your palm in front of your face pretending it's a window and fogging it up.  What does the air feel like?  It's warm!  Okay so now ask them to hold up an index finger, pretend it's a candle.  Can you blow it out?  They blow, but the air is cool.  Well what are you doing inside your mouth to create the warm air versus the cool air and then they have to discover the whole yawning sensation, which is the same that happens when they take a breath for singing.  So that whole thing.

And then anything that can get them to blow a steady stream of soft air I find is a huge deal.  Difficult for kids to do so I pull in things like I have a class set of pinwheels and letting them practice controlling that steady stream of air.  I like to divide them into groups of three and give them a pinwheel and one person watches the clock, the other one blows the pinwheel.  They have competitions for who can blow it for the longest amount of time.  That kind of thing.

Things like blowing bubbles.  Turning on a nice piece of music.  Passing out a class set of bubbles and then blow bubbles, you know.  The fact that they can make a stream of bubbles is the reward and it can only happen when they blow a steady stream of air, right?  

So I saw somewhere but I can't remember where it was that somebody was doing straw races with pingpong balls.  How fun is that, right?  You put a finish line down at the end, you know, and you have two kids and they're trying to race and see who can get their ping pong ball down to the finish line.  I thought that was cute.  That'd be a fun little center, right.

And then of course they have to learn their tonguing right?  The doo-doo-doo, right.  So for several months prior to beginning recorder instruction or the year before, they can read their regular reading syllables - whatever they are right.  The rhythmic syllables or Kodály or Feierabend or MLT - whatever it is.  But then also have them reading using "doo."  Voiced and unvoiced.  (Example given)    And then I went to Home Depot, my favorite store, and found some pvc pipe, the 1" pvc pipe and had them cut it into segments the same length as the recorder and put little stickers on there in the same place where the recorder holes would be and those are practice recorders so they can just learn their fingering before they actually get a real recorder.  So that's just another step.

Jessica:  Huh.  I like that.  Those are great ideas 'cause I always think of okay, once they've got the instrument what can I do with them now that they have it, but I love the idea of all that preparation beforehand that has everything to do with the breathing and the tone, but nothing to do with the instrument itself.

Darla:  Right.  Yeah.  And then when they do get the instrument, they're focusing on sound and not notation.  I save the notation for, you know, several weeks later.  Working on sound first.  There's scaffolding.

**To hear more from Darla, check out the next blog post about ideas for using Orff in the children's church choir**