Category: musical growth

Shift in my musical & professional identities #2

From the date of the midterm until now, I have been working diligently on the second set of tasks indicated in both my musical and professional action plans. For my musical action plan,  these included improving my tuning, strumming, fingering and positioning skills, memorizing the common chords, as well as learning two more songs on the ukulele on top of the two I already learned (“Riptide” and “You Are My Sunshine”), ultimately contributing to my ability to play the ukulele correctly and confidently.

The only differences between what I said I would do in my musical action plan and what I actually did is that I didn’t learn to read music (personally, I didn’t find that it was necessary for being able to play my ukulele), and I didn’t blog about my progress, other than the assigned “shift in musical & professional identities” blog posts (I decided that my time would be better spent on learning my instrument rather than blogging). Finally, I wasn’t able to find the tab for “The Hukilau Song” online in the key of C, which was a bit of a disappointment as I was looking forward to playing this song from my childhood. The result of this was that I had to switch to learning a different song in place of this one, so I chose an indie tune from my extensive music library (refer to YouTube link below to see/hear me play it). It’s called “Down In The Valley” by an indie folk band from Seattle, WA who go by the name of “The Head and The Heart”. It’s not the song I had originally hoped to play, though I think it still fulfils the expectation. In retrospect, this new song was possibly a better choice than “The Hukilau Song” because it includes picking (something I had never tried before) at the intro and an alternative strumming pattern, not the typical “island strum” that all the other songs I played use. The chords played are C, F, A minor and Csus4, a chord that I did not know existed and required lots of googling. The other song I learned was “Hey Soul Sister” by Train, and you can find a link to a YouTube video of me playing it below. This was a fairly basic song with F, G, C and A minor chords played using the “island strum”, but with quick chord changes and more of an unordinary rhythm.

In terms of my professional action plan, I managed to complete all the tasks I claimed I would do. These included 3 more lessons with my ukulele student (making that 5 lessons in total throughout the semester, 2 of which I partly filmed-refer to YouTube link below) to assure their ability to play the instrument at an adequate comfort level, their knowledge of strumming, tuning, fingering, and positioning techniques, and their ability to play at least 5 chords as well as one full song. For the song, I taught my student the most basic one I learned which was “You Are My Sunshine”. To begin, I went through the chords, strumming, rhythm, and lyrics very slowly with them, then when they felt confident enough to try playing it on their own, I filmed it (with permission) to show their amazing progress! On another note, I can also proudly say that my beginner ukulele guide (which was only half done at the midterm) is now completely finished and filled up with almost all the information one would need to learn the ukulele. You can find it amongst the links below.

We are now almost at the end of the semester, and after accomplishing both my musical and professional goals through my action plans, my identity in the world of music education has shifted drastically. I now understand that music plays a vital role in the BC Curriculum as well as in the lives of students, and that role cannot be replaced by any academic/non-arts class. It fulfils the expectations of the core competencies (communication, creative and critical thinking, personal and social) and the curriculum clearly states that “Dance, drama, music, and visual arts are each unique languages for creating and communicating.”. I also realized that through learning about different styles of music, we can discover new things about the countries/cultures they originate from that we would have never had the opportunity to learn otherwise. I absolutely loved being a part of this course! I learned way more information about music, and education in general, than I ever imagined I would, and now I am excited to incorporate that information into my future classroom. Plus, I just had so much fun and looked forward to every class. Thank you Anita!

 

Shift in My Musical & Professional Identities #1

My perspectives towards learning and teaching music have changed drastically based off my music and professional goals action plan. We were assigned to learn an instrument in this class, and I found myself dreading it, thinking that it would be too difficult for me and that I wouldn’t ever have time to practice. However, after starting out in accordance with my musical growth action plan, my thoughts instantly changed. I discovered that playing the ukulele really isn’t as hard as it seems! I have really enjoyed accessing this talent that I didn’t even know I had!

Along with my music goals action plan and a bit of help from Google, I started my self-teaching process by learning how to properly hold and tune my ukulele in the key of C. Then, I found a ukulele fingering chart (inserted below) so that I could easily follow along with it while learning the chords in my first song. The song I chose to learn first is called Riptide. It’s an upbeat, light-hearted pop song by Vance Joy, a singer-songwriter from Australia. I discovered through googling “easy songs to play on the ukulele” that it is a very common song for ukulele beginners to learn. The song has 4 different chords in it that are fairly easy to play: A minor, G, C and F. I referred to my fingering chart to learn where to place my fingers for these chords, played them for the first time and practised switching from one chord to another while doing the strumming pattern of Riptide. This was probably the hardest thing to do, especially when the chord changes were fast. I think it took me about two weeks of practice to perfect switching in between chords at the correct speed of the song while strumming properly. After that, I began singing along with my strumming and the song just kind of came together perfectly. At the bottom of this blogpost, you will find the link to a video of me playing this song that shows my progress and improvement. 

I repeated the same process for the next song I chose which was “You Are My Sunshine”, but because I now had one song under my belt, I found it easier to learn. The chords in this popular kids song are C, C7, G and F, so not too different from the chords in Riptide. The most difficult thing to learn in this song was how to switch quickly between C and C7 in the fourth line of the song (“When skies are grey”). I found the tabs for both of the songs I chose to learn on a website called Ukulele Tabs (https://www.ukulele-tabs.com/). It is helpful, easy to use, and contains almost every song one can play on the ukulele. At the bottom of this blogpost, you will find a link to the video of me playing this song that shows my progress and improvement. 

I have been successful at accomplishing almost everything that I originally said I would do in my musical growth action plan. One exception is that I didn’t end up posting updates on my blog about my learning progression. I found my time was better put to use practising my ukulele instead of writing about it. Another exception is that I have yet to learn how to read music. This would be a bonus to if I had more time, but so far I’ve been doing just fine without incorporating this skill into my learning. From September 15th until now, I consistently practised my ukulele approximately three times a week for twenty to thirty-five minutes each time. To be honest, this is more than I originally thought I would have time for.

In terms of my music pedagogy plan (professional goals action plan), I have not completed as many of my pre-set tasks as I would have liked to, and I think this is due to the fact that I have been focusing more on my music goals action plan. My professional goals action plan was to create a basic guide on how to play the ukulele and use it to teach my sister how to play. I realize now that this was an ambitious goal. In order to put together a guide to teach someone the ukulele (professional goals action plan), I had to first thoroughly learn and be comfortable playing the ukulele myself (music goals action plan). I focused first on my music goals action plan to learn the ukulele, then after I felt comfortable enough playing it, I started working on my professional goals action plan to teach the ukulele. So far, my beginners ukulele guide is halfway completed (I inserted a link to the document at the bottom of this blogpost), and I have had one lesson with my sister in which I taught her how to hold, tune, strum and play 5 chords on the ukulele. I made a video of this for evidence and inserted it below.

Ukulele fingering chart: