Alton Peters

Background Information Project

Student A

Student A is a 7th grader in one of my all girl classes. This student has a cognitive

processing disorder where what she sees, she cannot process and turn it into words in her

head. As a result, she is not able to read music. In addition to this, student A has severe asthma.

As a result, she is often winded, and usually is not able to sing the entire class.

This has caused me to come up with creative ways to still be able to teach the content

to this student while not overworking her or making her read the music. One of the main things

that I have done is start teaching the music aurally through fun echoing games. I sing solfege to

the students and use hand signs correlating to those hand signs, and they echo it back to me. I

do this before the students pick up their music, that way when we go to the music, all of the

different intervals are familiar to them. With this student in particular, I make sure we have all

of the sections put together before we move on. Once this is completed, I simply give a heads

up when we come to each section, and the student is able to put the rest of it together. The

plan is that soon, once we put the piano in with it, they will have the context clues within the

music to be able to put the pieces together on their own.

When it comes to the asthma of this student. I try to first teach the sections that are all

the same. This way, I teach it one time, and then the other sections are exactly the same. This

way, the student doesn’t have to sing repeatedly, saving their voice and not straining them too

much.
Student B

Student B will represent a number of students in my classes that are diagnosed with

ADHD, and therefore have IEP’s based on this diagnosis. One of the major problems we run into

with these students is the inability to pay attention for long periods of time. If we work too long

on one thing, they will start to lose focus, and we end up getting much less done on what we

were working on.

One of the ways that I try to adapt for this in my lesson is to have breaks built in to my

plan for the class. When they get to class, we do a couple of kinesthetic warm-ups to get them

moving and that tends to calm them down a little bit. During the breaks later in class, the

students are given an opportunity to stand up and stretch for a minute as well as talk to their

peers. This little break lets the kids get some of the energy out of their system, and then they

can start to refocus, and we are able to get back to working on our music. When we try to focus

too long on anything in that class, they aren’t able to focus, and trying to push through this is

counter-productive at that point. When I see this start to happen, that is when I make the call

to take a quick break.

So far, this technique has been relatively successful. There are certain times where the

students don’t seem to be able to concentrate at all, and any work we are doing at this point is

counter-productive. When this happens, I wrap up what we are doing, and we do something a

little more fun that still helps them keep singing. This usually ends up as us doing karaoke.

While it’s not the music that we are working on, it keeps the kids engaged in music, and at the

end of the day, that is what teaching music is all about.