Blein Vie Noa!
Hello and welcome to my music blog. This will primarily be a blog about musical goings on at the school that I teach at, but occasionally, I’ll post about my private music lessons. I’ve never done this before, so it’s a bit of an experiment. Bear with me though and apologies if I waffle….
A bit about me – I’m now in my 14th year of teaching . I knew very early on what I wanted to be. I was lucky enough to have some amazing music teachers who helped me realise my potential – Bill and Barbara Thompson, Liz Green (during my school days) and Francis Cummings (now Musical Director of Sistema Scotland) and Siobhan Peoples (renowned Irish fiddle player) whilst at Huddersfield and Limerick respectively. The road to teaching wasn’t an easy one – It took me 2 years and 10 interviews around the UK before I finally got onto a course. I came very close to giving up applying – many emotions ran through my head and I nearly gave up, but then Edge Hill took a chance. One year of secondary teaching and the rest at primary – fast forward 13+ years and here I am.
I have been teaching at the same primary school (Ballacottier Primary School on the beautiful Isle of Man) for 13-14 years now. I began by teaching general primary but I eventually was able to swap to covering PPA lessons, teaching music. I took the decision a few years ago to go part time – big step, but you can’t put a price on happiness. It was around this time that my private music lesson practice began to expand. I started out 13 years ago with 6 or 7 but I now currently have 34 pupils. I teach a mixture of traditional fiddle, ABRSM grades, theory and pop/rock piano.
At the school, I teach from reception right through to year six. In short, we don’t do SATs on the Isle of Man and haven’t for at least 8-9 years. Teachers still assess in maths, reading, writing and science, but it is more continuous. Progress in levels is still monitored and data is kept on a central system. There isn’t the need to have to worry about revision sessions and SATs practice.
I have up until now been planning music lessons according to the main class topics, but this year, I took the decision to change things because I felt that by planning through class topics, I was repeating some activities and skills but missing out others. I have made a long term plan where I have primarily focused on musical skills, rather than the topic. This is a combination of performance (individual and whole class skills), listening and appraising, composition (in groups/pairs, using ICT) and knowledge and understanding. An increasing focus over the past couple of years or so has also been made on Kodaly. I’m very interested in it and I’m trying to incorporate it into the start of music lessons with all year groups. We’re lucky to have Lucinda Geoghehan coming over in a couple of weeks to give some workshops on the island. Workshops and music CPD is not something that we get an awful lot of on the island, as the cost of bringing people over can be quite prohibitive. However, the IOM Arts Council and Culture Vannin are very supportive of projects and workshops and will help out wherever they can.
Here’s the long term plan for this academic. It’s not complete – for example, year 6 in the summer term tends to get interrupted quite a bit as they get into transition activities and sessions in the summer term. It’s not perfect and is very much work in progress – for example, the second half of autumn term totally changed because we were informed that we had an SSRE validation in the run up to Christmas (SSRE is our version of OfSted – no, we don’t have that either, but we do get notice of when we’re inspected!!). I want to see how this goes plan this year and then I’ll evaluate at the end of the year. There’s room for movement with regards to class assembly songs etc when people ask.
I also run several extra curricular groups at lunchtimes and after school. This includes samba group, school folk group, keyboard group, ukulele group and the junior school choir. The samba group is a new one this year – last year we were lucky enough to have Ollie Tunmer from the Beat Goes On over to the island to teach some workshops. I was really inspired by him at Music Expo in London and arranged for him to come over. In summer term, I tend to do a rock group instead of folk group. Keyboard group stops in the Spring term and in its place, we do an action song group in preparation for the Manx Music Festival. We also have a team of 4 peripatetic teachers from the island’s Music Service (guitar, violin, cello/double bass and sax/clarinet/flute).
The longest running extra curricular group is the junior choir, which I have been running for 8-9 years now. I must mention my former boss, John Rhodes, who was very much responsible for introducing music into the school originally. I approached him about making the choir more permanent after watching Last Choir Standing. He agreed and the rest is history. In short, I wouldn’t be at the school at all if it weren’t for him. The choir have sung all around the island at various concerts through the years and compete in the Manx Folk Awards and the Manx Music Festival every year. In October, they performed with Collabro at the Villa Marina . Just before Christmas, we found out that the choir had been accepted to perform at Llangollen International Eisteddfod in 2018 – we’ve never taken the choir off island before so it’s all totally new, but very exciting. I’ve never applied before because the costs and organisation of taking the choir off island are immense, but I took the plunge this year. Life is really too short! We have a Ballacottier Soundcloud page and some of the older choir recordings are on my personal Soundcloud page. I’ve also been running separate small mums, dads and staff choirs the past couple of years and have this year decided to put them together to create one big Ballacottier Community Choir. The destination is the concert choir class at the Manx Music Festival at the end of April. I’m also playing in the pit for Chess that week at the Gaiety Theatre, but it’ll be fine (nobody panic…).
Phew. That’s a long blog. I’ve no idea if you’re still reading. Probably not, but I wanted to make people aware of what goes on and how things are different in island schools. I’m surrounded on the island by some wonderful music co-ordinators in our schools and it being a small island, we all know and are supportive of each other.
As a final comment, I stupidly decided to train for a half marathon in the middle of what is probably going to be the busiest two terms ever. But hey, running makes me happy – I lost nearly two stone last year (and promptly put 1/2 stone back on over Christmas). Oh, plus I’m trying to sell my house…. Next blog post will hopefully be a video of the music room at school. I got this idea from a couple of teachers on Twitter – Jackie Schneider and Anna Thompsett. Thank you for reading!!
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