Great Day With Denise Gagne! Amy Burns Far Hills Country Day School aburns@fhcds.org
Denise began her workshop with warm-ups for the body and voice. She demonstrated her app, Vocal Warm-ups for Singers or Choir (https:// itunes.apple.com/us/app/vocal-warm-ups-forsingers/id597200553?mt=8). This is a great app for any singer or chorus from elementary to college. My favorite aspect of this app is that there is always one jazz warm-up with each set of warm-ups listed in the app. Denise then spoke about the Sub Tub that she is creating and will be available for sale next year. It will include games, manipulatives, etc, for those days that you are unexpectedly out and need to leave quick plans. This sub tub will have numerous materials that can be used at any time of the school year.
Figure 1: Photo by Jennifer Spence
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his past October, the Elementary Division of the North Jersey School of Music Association (NJSMA) held a workshop that featured music educator, author, and clinician, Denise Gagne. Many of us have used several of Denise’s materials from Musicplay to her recorder materials, to her apps, to so much more (http://shop.musicplaytext.ihoststores.com/default. aspx). She has a plethora of early childhood and elementary materials for the music classroom that are student-tested and work well for any classroom environment. Recently, Denise launched Musicplay Online (http://musicplayonline.com/), which is an amazing supplemental website for the Musicplay curriculum. She has placed audio files, manipulatives, pdf files of items for download, videos, music creation activities, interactive instruments, and more, on this website. This website is subscription-based; however, if you attend her workshops, she gives you a three-month subscription for free. Finally, when I attend a Denise Gagne workshop, I love that she never presents the same workshop twice. She always switches it up and keeps it fresh. As a presenter, I greatly admire that, as it is very tough to do!
Musicplay PreK Part 1 Fall Denise introduced her new, student-tested, Musicplay PreK curriculum (http://shop.musicplaytext.ihoststores.com/category. aspx?categoryID=119). She demonstrated some great activities such as, “Three Little Monkeys” to emphasize high and low sounds; “Monkeys” to emphasize actions and can be advanced to include partners; “Let’s Play Instruments” to pass out instruments in a 7/8 meter; and so much more! She has many songs that have the students experiencing the steady beat, high and low sounds, loud and quiet sounds, and fast and slow. Her book comes with the CD and the digital resources. I downloaded them all after the workshop and was thrilled to find videos of her with the PreK students performing many of her activities. This assists the teacher with learning how to accurately teach and perform the songs found in the book. Teach Music Reading With Boomwhackers Denise showed her resource, Teaching Music Reading With Boomwhackers (http://shop.musicplaytext.ihoststores.com/productinfo.aspx?productid=345). This book is very unique because there are not many boomwhacker resource books where the goal is to teach music reading. Denise uses a sequential process to take your students in grades two to five through learning 55 musical examples. Denise tested these activities with third graders and had great success with them. During the workshop, we thoroughly enjoyed her boomwhacker rendition of “Chop Sticks.”
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JANUARY 2017
