My experience with Pre-K

This week I got the chance to experience what its like to be a teacher in the preschool environment.  A few members including myself of the sophomore music education class are in brass band and were on tour during one of the keister music night experience assignments, (field studies).  To make up this assignment we had to create and schedule our own day of music with a preschool.  We all decided to separate into three groups and run three different music experiences for the kids based on their current curriculum.  For my station I decided to run a drum circle.  I prepared different lesson plans to include basic counting, rhythm, and solo vs accompaniment exercises.  I went in the classroom only to be greeted with failure to follow through my carefully planned lesson.  The children didn't want to follow the specific instructions so I had to adapt and change my plans.  I quickly realized that the drum was a barrier to rhythm.  I remembered the previous week that the children had sang songs while slapping their lip and clapping.  To revise the solo section of my lesson plan I had everyone in the group slap their lap and clap their hands while one child played on their drum.  This initiated a huge turn around and positive path for the drum circle.  Eventually we worked with playing soft and loud.  Some of the exercises I had the children do to teach them dynamics were getting as close to the floor as possible and then jumping up and creaming.  I had them do this exercise about three time and then transferred it to the drum.  Instead of screaming they were asked to play loudly on the drum.  Then we proceeded to work on speed.  After working with speed we routed all of the drums (7 drums) and practiced shapes of the drums (circle and triangle).  I did however still run into some challenges.  I had two "rules".  My two rules were that when I put my hands up everyone put their hands up and stopped talking.  The second rule was that when it was time to play the drum we put our hand on top of the drum head.  Some of the issues I ran into were children not wanting to participate, children throwing drums, and kids refusing to listen to instructions.  Some of the things I had to do to counter the behavior issues were to have the children put their drums on the floor, change topics and areas of focus quickly and repeatedly, and when it came down to it, the main teacher in the classroom had to remove two students who had behavior issues.  Overall I feel like my drum circle was a huge success.  My favorite moment was meeting a girl named Adriana.  The first thing a did with every group was go around and ask names.  Adriana softly spoke her name and another kid shouted out "down worry, she's just really shy".  When it came time to solo Adriana asked to solo and she played as loud and as fast as she could.  It reminded me of how music can be a channel that people feel comfortable expressing theirselves through when other channels are not as friendly.