Erin Emery-Dumas

As someone who believes that it’s incredibly important to teach topics that are cross-curricular, I try to incorporate other subjects in my lessons as often as possible. Something I am especially interested in recently is including writing samples to support their growth in ELA. After monitoring a standardized test, I realized just how difficult it is for students to write. Here are a few ideas I have and plan to utilize in the remaining weeks of the school year.

2nd Grade: Sentences

In second grade, our students are focused on writing one to two sentences at a time, making sure to use a proper sentence structure. In order to support this growth, I’m planning on having my students summarize books that we read in class. I want to read “Bach’s Big Adventure” to them and have them write a couple of sentences about what they learned. I plan on giving them sentence stems to help with this. Here are a few examples:

• Johann Sebastian Bach was a composer who…
• In the story, Sebastian…
• My favorite part of the story was when…

3rd Grade: Single Paragraph

In third grade, our students are focused on writing full paragraphs that are between 4-5 sentences long. Because of this, I plan on giving students questions to help guide them in writing a paragraph about an artist of their choice. I plan to use the music collection in Epic! Books and hope to let them choose someone that they are interested in learning about. This will give them ownership in their learning. After reading their selected book, I am going to have them answer the following questions:

• Who is your book about?
• What did they do in the book?
• When did they do this?
• Where did they do it?
• Why did they do it?
• How did they accomplish this task?

After answering the questions, I’m going to assist the students organize their answers into complete sentences, and then into a paragraph.

4th & 5th Grade: 5 Paragraph Essays

In 4th grade, students begin writing five paragraph essays, and this continues into 5th grade and all throughout the rest of their academic experience. I think the trickiest part about this is that they forget the structure of the paper. I am hoping to have my students write an essay about how to play the recorder after we spend a few weeks learning them. In their essay, I will be looking for a few different things:

• Introduction: “Attention getter” and short overview of essay content.
• Body Paragraph 1: How do you care for your recorder?
• Body Paragraph 2: How do you hold and play your recorder?
• Body Paragraph 3: What is the proper way to practice a new song?
• Conclusion: Short summary of everything in the essay.

I plan on creating a sample essay to share with you all soon!

Other Ways to Support ELA

• Read a LOT of music-related books.
• Analyze the lyrics of each song you read.
• Have students write down the lyrics of the songs you have learned (both with a guide and by memory).
• Teach songs in various languages, teach the translation, and have students summarize the main theme of the piece.
• Write about the characteristics of each instrument family.
• Write mini biographies about the musicians and composers that are in our lessons.
• Have students research an instrument of their choice and create a presentation about it.
• Make a venn diagram comparing different things in music, such as instruments, instrument families, musicians, composers, or pieces of music.

There are so many different ways to support ELA in the music classroom, and I hope that you try some of the ideas that I shared in your own lessons!