Yet another reason why I love Musical Futures International (MFI) - they get a whole class playing along. It's a perfect example of differentiation. 

Let me just start off by saying I fully believe in playing several instruments. As international school teachers, we expect our students to speak a minimum of two languages, but we know students who speak three or four quite well. Why not with instruments?

MFI has a 'Just Play' system in which students in a class rotate through instruments on the exact same song. Let's say you have a class of 24 students and your instruments are voice, chair drums (more on that in another post!), ukulele, keyboards (more on that in another post!), bass, and guitars. You are going to have four students on each section. The experienced guitarists will simply be given chords; beginners will have sponges placed in their lowest three strings and will play with simplified fingerings. The keyboardists (and note, these are kids who may not know how to play piano!) will be given crib sheets that show root position chords. On the screen, they'll see an animated lead sheet. As the students are learning the piece (discussing its structure, use of chords, improvising solos, etc.), the teacher keeps swapping groups.  "Everybody move to the group beside them and play those instruments!" This gives the kids a foundation on all the instruments found in the room, improves their listening skills because they always have to be focusing on the chord changes on their new instrument, and keeps them from getting complacent ("Sorry. I only play bass.")

Here's an explanation of how it works:

Why is this so helpful to the IB specifically? Well, at NIS, music is an elective. I have some, but not a lot, of choice in students. For example, if I get 10 drummers in one semester, the school takes pity on me and does some swaps. Otherwise, I get whomever I get.  When it comes to the creative cycle, it's sometimes hard to put together balanced groups because we don't want to end up with a pro group and then two groups with absolute beginners who can't play anything! Also, that's not really 'student voice and choice,' which is a strategy statement at my school.  Now imagine a class in which every single child has experience on voice, keyboard, ukulele, bass, drums and guitar. In this scenario, the kids have much more freedom in choosing their own groups and repertoire. Before, teachers might have said, "Well, that group has three guitarists, so I have to give you a pianist."  However, now there's much more flexibility. Now the question might simply be, "Will Bobby be on-task if he's working with Mike?" The question of feasibility in groupings has been solved. 

"Yes, Amy, but what if you get 5 drummers in one group?" Well, that's a comment for the next blog post. See you next week!

I used to be a purist. I used to hate TAB because I wanted students reading bass clef notation. Even kids who barely spoke English, had no music background, and were only going to be in my class for a trimester once in a three year period. Then I realised that was just not going to happen. That's when I started moving to meeting their needs. For example, If kids were 100% beginners on the bass, I'd just have them playing open strings and simple roots. If they had some experience, I moved them to TAB. Once they were intermediates, I started moving them to traditional notation. Musical Futures International advocates something very similar. In fact, they have these really cool Power Points in which animated chord chords show the piano, bass, ukulele, and guitar chords moving with the lyrics. 

Here's something that was controversial (to me), but once I wrapped my mind around it I really liked it. I have a guitar student who is a purist. He believes that students need to start off with the proper chords on full sized instruments because they need to stretch their hands and get used to quick changes. That's definitely true... for guitarists who love to practice for hours a day and will probably take grades 9 -> music. However, for my grade 6 who is taking music as an elective, and only has two classes available, learning the guitar in that short amount of time is very challenging. Musical Futures International advocates putting a piece of sponge under the first three strings of the guitar, then teaching the students the simplified chords. At first, this bothered me because I didn't want to teach the students something incorrect and then have to fix their hand positions later on (a.k.a. perfect practice makes perfect, right?). However, I realised that if the students still used the correct fingers in the simplified chords, then it'd be easier to move to the real chords later. ​

I could literally go on and on about how much I love Musical Futures International. In fact, I'm hoping to get them to run a workshop at Nanjing International School next year! However, I'm going to save that for another blog post (or ten).