*Week 13*

This week seemed to pass by very quickly, but we did some really fun activity. Before we had worked in binary form, and we did something similar this week, except rather than having only an A and B, there was A, B, and C. The song was split off into 3 parts rather than the two that we had learned about before. To understand the concept of this a piece of classical music was played and we started off by just listening to it. After we had heard it we learned a clapping pattern that we would do during the A part and than listened to the music and clapped through with it. Next we counted out the other parts of the song, and divided it into the B section and C section. We then got divided into two different groups and we had to come up with different movement to do with the counts. This was a really great fun activity because we were able to be creative with out moves and work together as a team to come up with something that matched the music. It helps with themes we had before such as teamwork and creativity. This is really important for children because those are some of the key concepts they need to know. We also did an activity where we followed a sheet of music through different patterns. The song had something to do with a cucko bird and it made it easier to read, and is a great idea for music. We didn't do as much this week for actual in class activities, but it was because we had Friday to work on our lesson plans. Overall it was a very good week in Music 373.

**Week 11**

This week we spent a great deal of the time working on our group project for children’s literature. Although we have no gotten a chance to present out lesson yet, so far it has been a really great experience. Finding the actual book was not difficult because a few people in our group had picked out some extra books when they were looking for their individual book. One person in our group had a very good book about the social skill of friendship, so we decided to go with that book. Deciding the book and coming up with the lesson was actually fairly easy because we had so many people collaborate and work together to get everything we needed accomplished. The biggest challenge that we found did not actually have that much to do with the lesson part of it, but simply finding time for the group to get together because it was such a large group and everyone’s schedules were so different. Putting all of our ideas together and coming up with something great was the most exciting part. We all had very different ideas, but they came together great and I feel we really did a good job because of it.
This is a really great experience and children in the classroom can benefit from something like this for many reasons. Although students may not be getting in groups to do lesson plans, working in a group overall can have a great deal of benefits. It really helps a lot with their social skills, and it helps with creativity because they can hear ideas that they hadn’t really thought of which will help them expand their ideas. They would really benefit from a similar experience.