Music
Music as a Teaching Tool-Incorporating music into almost any class can be a great way to teach content
Music is given prime importance as part of the school curriculum. Our school boasts of a highly accomplished music staff and a well-equipped music room on the school campus. Every child is encouraged and nurtured to learn at least one musical instrument starting from Primary grades. Social and emotional skills are learned every day by students as new scenarios present themselves. Music is one tool to engage each student and provide a pathway for connections and deeper understanding. Songs are essentially poems, and have a lot of meaning packed into few words. Our teachers do not just teach music and instruments, they direct the students and channel their minds to understand the finesse and intricacies of music.
Here are just a few examples of ways TGSB incorporates music into our classes:
· History is a subject that benefits greatly from having music as a lens to teach about cultural traditions and historical events.
· Mathematics can be challenging for students to understand because the concepts are abstract, which is the main reason it’s important to provide visuals and manipulative to students when first teaching a concept. Musical notes can help teach fractions, changing instruments but playing the same song can help teach patterns, and using pitch can help with frequency and ratios.
· Science can benefit from songs that teach about the skeletal system or incorporate mnemonics to help students remember the food chain. Music can be the content for teaching about sound waves and having children experience frequency in relation to pitch.
· Literacy improves when a student is able to pick up on the patterns in the structure of language and is able to differentiate between pitches in words that sound similar but have different meanings. Music can be utilized as a metaphor to explain elements of a story such as a character, setting, conflict, and resolution, using the melodies, instruments, tempos, and dynamics as the teaching lens.
Dance
Let’s do CHA CHA……
Dance Into More Engaged Learning: Dance moves and choreography can be useful in boosting students’ interest in and understanding of coding and other subjects.
Students use their bodies to communicate and express meaning through purposeful movements. Dance practice integrates choreography, performance, and appreciation of and responses to dance and dance making. Research shows learning through structured movement can be a fun and educational practice. Like music, dances have countable steps that can be used to enhance learning. With proper planning, educators can use students’ favorite dances to improve their understanding of new concepts and practices. Teachers at TGSB use dances when the class needs a warm-up or for motivation when students need breaks or pick-me-ups.
Theatre
Play area provides crucial and vital opportunities for children to play. There is substantial research showing a clear link between play and brain development. All learning – emotional, social, motor and cognitive is accelerated, facilitated and fuelled by the pleasure of play.
We truly understand this fact and that is the reason we have both indoor and outdoor play area for our little ones.
Indoor Play area: The indoor learning environment allows children to become an active participant that is the reason we have a spacious indoor play area with brightly colored walls and all kinds of equipment for the little ones to learn in a lively atmosphere.
Sandpit: Playing in the sand can be a great opportunity for children to have unstructured playtime. Whether shaped into castles, dug, dripped, sifted, or buried, sand can take many different forms, thus offering endless opportunities for fun and learning! The sandpit area is designed with the intention to give to tiny hands their own world of imagination and creativity. Eye-hand coordination and small muscle control through the use of buckets and shovels make learning fun. Playing in the sandpit allows children to create anything they want to out of the sand. They build castles, roads, towns, rivers, etc.
