Time signature lesson

On Monday March 3^rd I gave a mock general music lesson for 8^th graders. The students in my class were the pretend 8th graders. The experience was interesting. Although we had ten minutes to teach our lesson, at first I thought I would not have enough material teach the full ten minutes. Turns out I did not even get through half of what I had planed. When teaching a lesson ten minutes flies by.

I wanted to go with a creative approach. My topic that I had to teach was time signatures. I thought I was lucky because I had what I thought was an easy topic to teach. Time signatures is not a hard concept but it is a broad concept. While I started preparing I realized I can talk about so many things and use so many examples of time signatures. One of the first mistakes I made was trying to teach more than one time signature in ten minutes. I can teach more than one if I had a full class but for the purpose of starting the class I should of stuck with common time.

Another thing I did wrong was way too much explanations. The students were supposed to be in 11^th grade so I should of expected more background knowledge from the students. Since I wanted to focus on creativity I handed out blank sheet music for the students to write rhythms down in the given time signature. When the students were done I would call on a couple to write their example on the board. This I think would have been a great activity if I got around to it with more time.

One more thing I could of done better was prepare examples for the class. In stead of preparing examples and printing them out I made my own examples on the bored and that took way too much time. That was probably the biggest time waster for me. If I were to do this lesson again I would prepare my own examples, and focus on one type of time signature instead of trying to cram them all into one lesson.