Kelly Riley's Music Classroom

Below is the Google presentation, including all of the links from my OMEA/TI:ME conference session “Web Apps for the Music Classroom” presented February 18, 2012 at 8:00 AM. [iframe]<iframe src=”https://docs.google.com/present/embed?id=dg5mvhsk_23drqnb7gf&interval=10&size=m” frameborder=”0″ width=”555″ height=”451″></iframe>[/iframe]   P.S. If you want to check out the #musedchat hashtag on Twitter before making the leap to getting your own Twitter [...]

Below are the links and notes for my OMEA/TI:ME conference session “I Have a SMART Board… Now What?” presented February 16, 2012 at 2:45 PM. Getting started with a SMART Board in 4 easy steps 1. Setting up and orienting the SMART Board and projector Hardware Basics for Front Projection SMART Board Interactive Whiteboards Orienting your SMART Board interactive [...]

I was recently asked by my district administration if I would be willing to supervise a student teacher. Yay! It’s been a couple of years since I had the opportunity to work with a student teacher. I’ve been lucky to have some really great pre-service teachers to work with in the past, and I’ve missed [...]

Well, it’s that time of year – teacher job interview season! In my eight years of teaching I have held four different full-time teaching positions in three school districts. My first teaching job lasted a year, and I resigned because it was not a good fit for me. My next position was for two years, [...]

What are we going to do this December? The same thing we do every December: learn about Tchiakovsky’s ballet, The Nutcracker. I mean, why not? Tchaikovsky is widely regarded as a master composer, the music is interesting and familiar, the kids love the story, and ballet is an important art form to expose kids to. [...]

I just realized that today is the second anniversary of the SMART Board installation in the music room at Washington! Here is the photo I took of it exactly two years ago when I walked in the morning after Thanksgiving break to find it installed. (I took this picture with my phone that day, and [...]

Year Nine?!??!? Yes, I am solidly into my ninth year of teaching elementary music. I can hardly believe that it was well over a decade ago that I decided to become a music educator. Last year was a difficult one for me. I had a hard time getting as excited as I used to about [...]

If you attended the Music Tech Fun Day on October 21 and have not yet completed the survey, please click here to help TI:ME improve future offerings. Below are downloads and links for my session on SMART Board Basics presented at the TI:ME Central Ohio Music Tech Fun Day. To open SMART Notebook files, you [...]

In preparation for the new school year, I have archived last year’s Washington Elementary composers of the month here as a blog post. As you revisit these composers, are there any requests for composers for the upcoming year? Like last year, I will be working with Mr. Stevens, our art teacher, to try to find [...]

At a professional development session, my building literacy coach and I presented on how to create a podcast listening library for your classroom or school. Here is our sample reading, We Are in a Book (An Elephant & Piggie Book) by Mo Willems. [audio http://www.klsriley.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/We-Are-in-a-Book.mp3] Creating a podcast with GarageBand ’08 GarageBand makes it easy [...]

Some of my favorite listening lessons are from Camille Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals. My youngest students like guessing what animal Saint-Saëns was trying to portray with the different instrument sounds and musical styles. I have found that they are very intuitive listeners and can often guess the correct animals! With first graders, I lead [...]