By Carolyn Sharpe
Starting a recorder program in your school is a worthwhile way to strengthen your students’ musical skills and add to their love for music. It creates a motivating structure for your lessons and becomes a framework in which students and teachers can thrive! Here are five great reasons to start teaching recorder to your elementary music students:
1.Playing the Recorder is a Pathway to Lifelong Music-Making
When we decide what to teach our students, we are planning not only for the lesson, for the unit, or for the year. We are planning for them to use the musical skills that they learn as they go on to the next grade, the next level, and ultimately throughout their lives. Teaching students to play recorder gives them an accessible introduction to playing a wind instrument, to reading music, and to the idea of making music at home. Because the recorder is so portable and so affordable, it becomes a way to get music into the homes of our students! The very act of sending a recorder home with students is an act of bringing live music into homes, an opportunity that is more and more rare in our highly media-saturated culture. By bringing recorders into the homes of our students, we are normalizing the idea of making music at home as both an exercise in the gratification that comes with practice and as an avenue to making music for the joy of it!
2. Recorders Pave the Way to Music Literacy
Recorders are a fantastic way to bridge the aural approach that is often taken in the early grades and the more visual approach that we want to encourage in the intermediate grades. Many beginning recorder songs use a limited pitch set of B, A, and G. This pitch set is a perfect launching pad for “baby steps” to reading music. As teachers, we are able to take songs like “Merrily We Roll Along,” and use the familiarity of the tune to bridge the unfamiliarity of notation. Students learn to decode and learn for themselves. This musical independence unlocks the key to more and more enjoyment, which will lead to more and more motivation, making your job as a teacher all the more rewarding.
3. Recorders Help Students Develop Responsibility and Self-Discipline
As music educators, we are never teaching only one skill at a time. There are a multitude of benefits for students beyond the musical skills they learn in our classrooms. When we use recorders as a pathway to teaching music, there are many ways that this happens. One area that students must exercise is that of self-discipline. There are very few things more tempting to a child than the ability to make “noise” on an instrument! And yet, they must learn the self-control of waiting until it is time to play with the group and exercise the fine motor control and breath control necessary to make that noise into a musical sound. After students have learned the basics of playing, I highly encourage them to take their instruments home to practice. (I also always give a rather lengthy speech about being considerate of others in their homes before this happens.) Students are then able to
reap more of the rewards of practice, but they are also given the additional responsibility of bringing the recorder back on the right days. Honestly, that’s hard for elementary students! I like to ask my students to keep their recorders in their backpacks which helps them remember. They are encouraged to take the recorder out and practice at home, but to then put it back so that their next day of having music doesn’t sneak up on them. There are times when students will forget, but I’m confident that sometimes the natural consequence of not having something they really want can be a benefit to helping them learn what is not just a musical skill, but a life skill.
4. Teaching Recorder Helps Build Back Instrumental Programs
We want our students to continue their musical involvement throughout their school years. One of the realities of teaching post-pandemic has been that the performing ensembles in the middle and high schools have had a harder time getting back to the numbers they had before the pandemic. There were some very real hurdles to making music in ensemble settings, and we as a profession, are still recovering from that. Research has shown that strong elementary music programs have an incredible impact on the performing ensembles in the upper grades. Giving students experience with a wind instrument helps to drive the excitement about joining band, orchestra, or choir later on in their school careers. Not only do they have the basic exposure to the fundamentals of playing an instrument and reading music, but they will also have the motivation and enjoyment of playing music together to drive that desire.
5. Recorders Renew Excitement for Students and Teachers
If you haven’t taught recorder before, or you haven’t taught it in a while, it’s a wonderful way to infuse your music program with new enthusiasm. Our brains crave novelty and trying something new feeds that desire within us. For teachers and students alike, learning to play (or teach) recorder gives us a new challenge. If that feels like a lot to tackle on your own, there is so much support! Macie Publishing not only has great materials that make the entire process of teaching recorder simpler, but they also are able to provide great support as you use those materials. Not only that, but the materials are a joy to use! Macie offers great opportunities to expand your recorder program by incorporating elements like Orff orchestrations, handheld rhythm instruments and ukuleles. Your students will gain an incredible sense of self-satisfaction and you as a teacher will gain fresh ideas and the joy of doing something new.
There are an incredible number of benefits to teaching recorder, both for students and teachers alike. If you have any questions or would like a quote or more information about how Macie Publishing can improve the experience of teaching recorders for you and your students, please contact us anytime!
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