Music
2019 saw the implementation of the Kodaly pedagogy at the Year 3 level. The children developed their understanding of the moveable ‘doh’. This enabled them to not only sing songs using solfa, but transfer the solfa pitches for a given song to pitched instruments. The children played the given piece in various transpositions. The children demonstrated their understanding of moveable doh on pitched instruments, playing a given piece of music in a range of keys. Likewise, the children were able to make pitch dictations on the music stave (of a given song) and demonstrate they could transpose the melody on the stave using solfa. Grasping the concept of moveable doh has provided the children with a much deeper learning experience and in turn further developed their aural skills. A wonderful bonus of teaching this pedagogy has been the development and the strengthening of the Year 3 singing skills. As a result, the vocal contribution
that the Year 3 students made to the 2019 Junior Choir was very strong. The Seesaw programme was used to report on children’s music learning from Years 1–6. Most of the posts were video recordings of class performance activities. This provided a valuable tool for both the children and their teachers to reflect upon classroom learning. The children loved sharing their learning through this medium, and the accessibility was appreciated by the parent community. This year the children enjoyed the performance of the adapted opera The Barber of Seville put on by the New Zealand Opera. The opportunity to enjoy the performance of live music makes up the performance component of the Music curriculum. Once again, we were entertained by a superb performance. New Zealand Opera provided detailed resource material that was able to be used to prepare the audience in advance of the 41
