Student, Music, and Behavior

The other day I taught an iPad science lesson with a group of eight graders. After the explanation and practice student were to work independently on their project. Unfortunately these 8th graders could not work independently and quietly at the same time (not a huge surprise).

The students worked hard to fill the void of silence with smack talk across the room distracting each other and getting off task. Luckily I had a Kidz Bop 23 CD in my bag and I put it in and immediately the talking stopped (the singing, the foot taping, and head bopping started but hey they were all working).

Surprisingly children have difficulty focusing in a completely quiet environment and they seek to fill the void with unproductive noise/chatter. Having some music that can play in the background will help to greatly reduce behavior issues in these situations.

I like the Kidz Bop CD's because they feature songs the kids know but they have been filtered so there is no inappropriate language. The 8th graders scoffed at the kids singing but got over it.

If you have had problems with behavior during independent work consider adding music into the mix and see what happens!

Comments

icesk8abc said…

I completely agree! This is one of the reasons it drives me crazy to have to give the 4 hour state tests in absolute silence.

April 12, 2013 at 9:27 PM

Picture of the Day - Activity

I attended a training class and a science coach shared an activity that he does with his students to help them differentiate between observations, inferences, and predictions. He puts a picture on the interactive white board as a warm up (he gets the pictures from a variety of sources but uses National Geographic's Picture of the Day a lot). The picture above is from the National Geographic site. He has the students make five observations. Then he makes the students make five inferences. Finally he has the students make five predictions. He does this every day and it really drives home the difference between those three key inquiry vocabulary terms. I've done this activity with both my sixth and fourth grade science classes and the students really got into it and became proficient at telling me the difference between those terms.

Weathering, Erosion, and Deposition Activity

I saw this activity at a science conference years ago and haven't had a chance to use it in a classroom until this week (mainly because I didn't teach weathering, erosion, and deposition). It is a great way to reinforce the definition of the weathering, erosion, and deposition in a highly kinesthetic manner. Basically you break the students up into groups of three. One group is "Weathering" another group is "Erosion" and the third group is "Deposition". Add tape to the back because you are going to stick them to the forehead of the children in each group. The "weathering" students get a sheet of paper that is their "rock" they will be breaking down. At the start of the activity the "weathering" students will start ripping tiny pieces of their "rock" and handing it to the "erosion" students. The "erosion" students will be running their tiny piece of "rock&

Bill Nye Songs with Lyrics

At the end of the Bill Nye videos he always has a fun song that goes with the episode. You can find many of the songs as stand alone videos on YouTube. This came in handy because today I am teaching a lesson on layers of the atmosphere and found a song from his Atmosphere video on YouTube titled "Fresh Aire." I really wanted to remix it and put the lyrics on the video (so the kids could sing along and see how the lyrics matched the lesson). The first thing I did was found a site that has all the Bill Nye lyrics posted used my YouTube downloader ( see instructions here ) and downloaded the song. I then imported the video into Movie Maker Live and used the caption feature to put the lyrics on the different frames (cutting and pasting from the lyrics site into Movie Maker Live). I saved the video and reposted to YouTube so other teachers could use the video with lyrics (the finished video is posted above). The process was pretty easy and I am thinking about doing it for more

Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

Search This Blog