Roll & Tell Time

Today I begin my 4th year of teaching music at the elementary school in Salmon. I teach grades K-5, and the elementary students (K-4) come to me for 45 minutes twice a week. I teach a block schedule, so most of my students either come to me Monday/Wednesday or Tuesday/Thursday. There's a few things I've implemented since I began teaching that I want to share.

Since the kids come to me twice a week, I like to do a different introductory time for each of the 2 different days. One day a week at the beginning of class, we sing the Star Spangled Banner and do our "Braindance" (dance + exercise) routine to music. The other day a week, we do "Roll & Tell Time", which is a listening and sharing exercise using the Sharing Star (only the person with the Sharing Star talks).

The first year I implemented this, the Monday students told about what they did for fun the previous weekend, and the Thursday students told about what they were looking forward to the next weekend.

The second year I used a new and different system. The Student of the Day in each class rolled two dice, and the two numbers were combined (not added) to create a 2-digit number. Each number had a correlating "Favorites" question that the students answered. Here the list of all 36 numbers and the Favorites questions we answered:

#11: Food
#12: Drink
#13: Dessert
#14: Candy or Candy Bar
#15: Snack Food
#16: Ice Cream Flavor

#21: School Subject
#22: Thing to do at Recess
#23: Cafeteria Lunch
#24: Book
#25: Song
#26: Sport

#31: Color
#32: Number
#33: Animal
#34: Toy
#35: Hobby
#36: Part of Physical Appearance

#41: TV Show
#42: Movie
#43: Cartoon
#44: Electronics Game
#45: Board Game
#46: Household Chore

#51: Thing to do with Family
#52: Thing to do with Friends
#53: Activity to do in the Summer
#54: Activity to do in the Fall
#55: Activity to do in the Winter
#56: Activity to do in the Spring

#61: Place to Visit
#62: Vacation Spot
#63: Thing to do on the Weekends
#64: Restaurant
#65: Store to go Shopping at
#66: Happy Memory

I created a new and different "Roll & Tell" system again for this school year, combining a few aspects of different board games. Instead of rolling two regular dice this year, the students will roll just one dotted one as well as an alphabetical dice from the "Scattergories" game. The letter they roll will correlate with the starting letter of an adjective on a card from the game "Apples to Apples". The number of the dice will correlate with an amount of time. After rolling, the Student of the Day will make up a sentence using both the adjective beginning with the letter rolled and the space of time correlating with the numbered dice. Here's the list of Adjective cards to go with the Alphabetical dice (some of these cards I had to create because they weren't included in the "Apples to Apples" game):

A is for: Awesome, Appetizing, or Artistic
B is for: Busy, Boring, or Brave
C is for: Colorful, Comfortable, Confused, Cool, or Courageous
D is for: Depressing, Delicious, or Dangerous
E is for: Easy, Exciting, or Encouraging
F is for: Fantastic, Friendly, Frightening, Funny, or Fun
G is for: Great, Good, or Grateful
H is for: Hilarious, Helpful, or Hard
I is for: Intelligent, Important, or Impatient
J is for: Jolly, Jealous, Joyful
K is for: Kind, Crazy, Creative, Cranky, or Cute
L is for: Lazy, Lucky, or Loud
M is for: Misunderstood, Magical, or Mischievous
N is for: Neat, Normal, Nice, Noisy, or New
O is for: Odd, Overwhelming, or Outstanding
P is for: Playful, Peaceful, Painful, Patriotic, or Powerful
R is for: Relaxing, Responsible, or Risky
S is for: Smart, Scenic, Speedy, Silly, or Strange
T is for: Tough, Talented, or Tasty
W is for: Wonderful, Weird, Wild

This is the list of amounts of time to correlate with the numbered dice:
1 - today
2 - yesterday
3 - this week
4 - this month
5 - this year
6 - your life

So, for example, if I were the Student of the Day and rolled a letter R and the number 3, I would pick an adjective on one of the R cards. Then I would make up a question that included both the R adjective on the card (Relaxing) and the space of time (this week). I could ask "What's the most relaxing thing you've done this week?" and then pass around the Sharing Star for the students in the class to answer. This new system will take more thought, but the students will be in charge more of creating their own questions for their classmates instead of me coming up with all the questions. Our school is using the "Leader in Me" ideas from the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People this year, and I feel like this new "Roll & Tell Time" goes along with that idea of the students becoming leaders.

I want to note that I use a completely different system for my Kindergarteners, because this would be way too complex for them to understand. I just ask them a unique question that has to do with each musical lesson, and that has worked pretty well for their level of learning.

I'm excited for this new concept and I hope the students will all enjoy doing something new during "Roll and Tell Time", too!