Week Five: Haslett Middle School, 7th Grade

This past week I had my fifth observation of Mrs. Valla's seventh grade choir.  Since the school had their choir concert that evening I was unable to do a teaching exercise with the class, but it was really cool to watch the students prepare for their program!

The class met in the high school auditorium to get used to singing in the space before concert time, so the students were pretty keyed up with excitement at the beginning of rehearsal.  Mrs. Valla pulled them into focus right away, though. Each week I am so fascinated by her classroom management skills - she doesn't allow for any wasted time. Moving right along between exercises without breaks means no room for talking or fooling around!

One of the warm up exercises really stuck out in my mind - the students sang "I love to sing" (do-mi-sol-do-sol-mi-do) and were having a difficult time projecting their sound in such a large auditorium, because it's not the space that they're used to.  Mrs. Valla instructed the students to aim their sound to the back of the aud.  This helped the singers to focus their sound and had them singing more on their breath.  Mrs. Valla didn't need to give a ton of instructions or talk a lot, it was just one simple, to-the-point request that was effective.

The class ran their repertoire, stopping only in between pieces to work a few things.  The music is memorized for the concert, which appears to have the students more engaged and focused on the conductor (because they're not buried in their music).  One thing that I've noticed in all my observations is that Mrs. Valla is constantly modeling for her students, portraying good diction, tone, energy, etc, and their sound pretty much always improves when she does this.  She also commented before rehearsing one of the pieces, "Think about how much energy you have to employ." This was a great reminder for the students - short and to-the-point, it had them standing up taller and using their breath more efficiently.

This was a very informative observation for me, and I look forward to having the opportunity to work with the students a bit next week!