Submitted by Pamela Rezach
Idea posted July 17, 2006
When I taught elementary school, I drew the staff on the floor using shoe polish. It works great. (The custodians suggested this, so they were happy, too.)
Each student was assigned to a specific spot of a given line of the staff. It was a big staff, as I had to give enough room for the students to sit down without bumping into each other. It took up most of the classroom floor, but we could then use the staff for music activities, too. It worked well.
I also had little tables made. They were about 7" off the floor, if I remember correctly, and just high enough that the students could rest the binder of the music book on the table. They could then hold the book with both hands, helping them to keep proper posture. The tables were long enough to let three 5th graders sit at them, and only about 12" wide. (I had 8 tables for the room at my small school and 12 tables for my big school.) My students used these to set their books on or do paper work on.
NOTE: I painted each table a different color. This way I could say, "Give the blue table a hand; they were sitting using perfect posture when we...." OR "Yellow table, stop talking." It saved an enormous amount of time using the colors and corrected situations at the stop of a dime. (O.K. I'll admit it. I didn't know all 650 students' names, so it helped me tremendously! :)) They also made my room look so colorful!
The tables could easily stack or slide to the side of the room for movement activities.