Karla Cherwinski: SMARTBoard Ideas for Your Music Classroom

    We started our school year off with a bang!  Our joint ROCKE & CSU workshop was well attended and packed with information and useable ideas to take back to our classrooms. Karla Cherwinski (also our CKI level 3 teacher) from Ohio was our presenter.  She teaches 800-900 students in her school, which is a K-2 school.
    Karla received a grant for a SMARTBoard in her classroom, and frequently uses it in her music lessons.  She finds that the students are actively engaged, can receive immediate feedback, and love to interact with the technology.  She guided us through the SMARTBoard basics, we saw interactive tools in the gallery, and many ways to prepare and practice concepts.  We were able to add some new songs to our repertoire such as "Sasha," "Mrs, Murphy's Chowder," "Rabbit and the Possum," and "We are Dancing in the Forest."

Karla reading "Little Green" by Keith Baker.  She uses this book in kindergarten for pitch exploration and collaborates with the art teacher.
A fun song for voice exploration and high & low is "I Can't Pay the Rent" (see video). 
Karla uses "fireworks" on her SMARTBoard as positive reinforcement when students get a correct answer. http://www.maylin.net/fireworks2.html

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    "SMART Exchange" is an online sharing site where you can download ready-made lessons.  Music teachers are starting to post more and more, and Karla has found some fantastic lessons there.  She found a koosh ball game, some rhythm assessment files, and melodic patterns assessment lesson with audio clips.  To go to the website: http://exchange.smarttech.com/index.html 
    Our next workshop will be October 29th with Leigh Ann Garner at Trinity United Methodist Church in Downtown Denver.  There will be board nominations and a soup lunch.

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