Reflections on the Unit Plan Lesson 1: When I taught this lesson, I found that the students had a difficult

time with the ending, but in general the song was very simple. I think it would be good to add more musical concepts to this lesson, such as proper singing voice development and pitch-matching skills. Or, I could have added a clip of a West African dance and challenged the students to move their entire body to the beat and rhythm like many West African dancers do. I also should have considered the book and the pictures and the stereotypical view of Africa. The book I used may have been going in the wrong direction for my goal of authenticity. Though the town drawn in the pictures was very unique and modeled after a real town in West Africa, the noticing of the animals and such seems like repetition of things they have probably heard before. Lesson 2: I did not teach this lesson, but I taught something similar. The drum circle is the addition. This lesson has good structure, but it would be difficult to guide the students to do a creative rhythmic improvisation when I know that most of them would try to do my example or just hit the drum wildly. This would also be a challenge for students who have a really hard time performing under pressure. Even though other students would be playing with them, many students may feel like they did not do their best at all because they were rushed into it. If the majority of the students had a difficult time, this is something I would come back to and work on in later units, because playing rhythms without notation is a large part of 21st century skills in music education. Lesson 3: When I taught this lesson, many students had a really hard time playing the ostinato. Staying with a steady beat was nearly impossible for the singers and the players. Having a rest in an ostinato that seems to last such a long time is difficult for students that have not developed rhythmic audiation

Reflections on the Unit Plan skills. The next addition I could have used would be to have them bounce to the beat or have the rowers make sound instead of just move their arms together. Lesson 4: This lesson was mostly difficult in terms of classroom management. The students took every opportunity to make a joke out of the rainforest sounds. Impulse control is difficult for students in third grade, and it gets even harder when one person is making a sound and all the other students cant help but join in and make their own. There are some students for whom this seems nearly impossible to avoid. I think that this lesson is bound to come with those struggles, and the content is worth teaching, as long as the classroom does not get completely out of control. My only real other option would be to turn the classroom into a very strict environment where students are reprimanded for any sound or movement that is out of line. I think that would take away from the lesson, though, because the whole lesson would be taken up by punishment. No matter how much prevention is incorporated into this, it is expected that there will be a little crazy going on for a short time and I am okay with that within reason. Lesson 5: I have not taught this lesson, but one of the biggest challenges I foresee with this is with the students that have cognitive or physical disabilities, and also students that just learn games more slowly and are unmotivated to try. This is when I would turn to the circle version where the whole class plays together. It does not have the same effect, but steady beat and the ideas behind rock-paper-scissors are still incorporated, so the connections still make sense in the purposes of the lesson. Unit Plan: Often today, music classes incorporate lessons on other countries for one or two lessons and then they move on. I am happy with my unit plan because it focuses on not just world music or African music, but specifically West African music culture. I believe this is better than getting in music from every continent and country in. Going in deeper helps the students remember and understand much

Reflections on the Unit Plan more fully. After teaching the lessons I did, and some are not included in this unit plan, I noticed a change in the attitude the students had toward African people. They were no longer speaking about them as if they were cavemen who say many words with alternating consonants and short a vowels. Also, the image of all African children being sad and constantly starving was changed in many of their minds, and this was shown to me by questions and comments the students would have throughout the lessons. They know that many children in Africa suffer much more than children in the U.S., and that it is not a place of luxury around every corner like it might be for these students. They already know that from all the media and adults that tell them so. My goal was to provide them with the other image, which is also a true image. I feel strongly about these things, and that helped shape the development of these lessons for me. I have visited South African and Sudan, and have had the desire to pass on some of the things I learned there since the trip. I think it is important for students to learn musical concepts and skills while being shaped as people in the modern world of cultural peace and interaction. If we can guide the citizens of the future in this direction, is my hope that more understanding, mutual respect, and love will become a greater part of society.