It is the most fundamental aspect of music, yet so many students struggle with rhythm. How does one effectively teach budding young musicians to properly feel and read the rhythms all around them? Eileen Benedict, vocal music specialist at the Edith L. Slocum School in Ronkonkoma, New York, finds it best to start teaching her young students not…

At the end of "Glee's" most recent season finale, Will Schuester--show choir director, student role model, and all-around good guy despite an impending midlife crisis--abandons his long-time Broadway dream so he can continue to foster a love of music among his adoring students. In the real world, of course, real music teachers are continually…

Guitar songleading is a critical component in music education and music therapy training curricula. However, at present, there is no standardized instrument to evaluate guitar songleading performance that is both valid and reliable. The purpose of this article is to describe the construction, development, and testing of a guitar songleading…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the factors that influence adolescent males to enroll in school choir as an elective class and to assess their attitudes about singing in general, self-concept of their own voices, and perception of others' view of adolescent males' participation in choir. Data were obtained from 101 adolescent males…

The study investigated how San students of Botswana, in a junior community secondary school, understood literacy in school and at home. A qualitative, narrative case study approach was used to gain a deeper understanding of what students value and understand by literacy from co-participants' and informants' perspectives. Findings across…

This study sought to ascertain the specific assessment strategies used by middle- and high-school choral directors in Georgia to evaluate sight-singing. Data was further gathered to determine which assessment practices choral directors considered to be the most effective. Although there had been previous studies that attempted to determine the…

As a teaching artist in public schools, the author is paired with classroom teachers to teach poetry and to give students an opportunity to experience their academic curriculum through the arts. At the beginning of the school year, she gave her students the on-going, yearlong assignment to watch the news, to pay attention. Knowing many of them…

Data Day, an event that is the culmination of a multiple-week unit, is the perfect opportunity to work across disciplines and, in particular, aligns beautifully with skills and objectives geography teachers work on with their students. Bruce Jones at The Blake School in Hopkins, Minnesota, was the originator of Data Day. Jones described the…

Guiding students through a unit of study in any discipline can be a challenging endeavor. Answers to possible questions that may be raised about historical events and literary texts cannot be confined to just one text, one author's point of view, or even one genre. The song-poem, in combination with poetry, novels, nonfiction, and other genres, is…

Much attention has been paid in the literature to matters of script choice vis-a-vis languages. This attention, however, has focused on script choice in a national and political context. By contrast, there has not been any significant attention paid to more local and idiosyncratic instances of script choice operating on an individual and community…

Music education researchers have a lengthy history of examining reasons why individuals seek participation in musical activities. Within that history, however, the concept of "possible selves" (Markus & Nurius, 1986) has received little attention until recently. In the broadest terms, possible selves are a person's impressions of what they might…

Encourage literacy with twenty original songs by musician and educator Al Balkin! Children's and school librarians will welcome "Tune Up to Literacy", a handy package of music and activities that musically introduces and reinforces crucial literacy concepts such as the alphabet, vowels, consonants, nouns, verbs, adjectives, sentence construction,…

This article discusses the notion of sharing music and culture as an effective platform to celebrate diversity in Melbourne, Australia. My research project "Celebrating Music Making and Finding Meaning" investigates and illustrates a context of diversity, one that promotes respect in a multicultural society sharing music and culture of a…

This paper presents an overview of modalities that can be used to make learning statistics fun. Representative examples or points of departure in the literature are provided for no less than 20 modalities. Empirical evidence of effectiveness specific to statistics education is starting to emerge for some of these modalities--namely, humor, song,…

The aim of this study was to investigate the temporal structure of mother-infant interactions with songs, with particular attention to two aspects: 1) the singing of the mothers to their infants, and 2) the non-verbal behaviours mothers and infants produce in synchrony with the musical beat. Four mother-infant dyads were video-recorded when the…