Sigma Alpha Iota

Winter 2020 20 PAN PIPES Jaclyn Perez before a banner for the Association of German Music Schools in Berlin. SAI PHILANTHROPIES, INC. In May of 2019 I attended the Musikschul Kongress (Music School Congress) in Berlin, Germany. I chose to write about the one workshop that le the most lasting impression on me called "Chances through cooperative tandem work in the Elementary Music Pedagogy (EMP)." e speaker was Jule Greiner; she is a professor for EMP at the Institute for Music at Osnabrueck College in Lower Saxony, Germany. Her presentation was indeed in German, so I will offer my interpretation through what I understood (I am fluent but not a native- speaker) e first topic discussed was running camps or holiday programs using a cooperation between music and visual art. She told us about a program she ran in tandem with an art teacher. Two courses for children were running parallel and at the end the students from each program met and combined their work. On the last day the music students came to where the art students had been creating. e music students had prepared excerpts from Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, and the art students had constructed a "Great Door of Kiev." ey presented the musical piece combined with the art to the parents on the last day of the program. Greiner advocated for working on ideas together, bouncing ideas off each other, always listening intently to the other teacher, and building from the bottom up as an even sided team. e next topic was a cooperation between her as a music teacher and different types of Kitas. Kita stands for Kindertagesstätte, which literally means children's day place. It is a child daycare center or preschool. In Germany there are numerous types of "themed" schools where students can have an education based primarily in that one field. Such examples include: forest kitas, sport kitas, natural healing kitas, bilingual kitas. ere were other programs mentioned such as Reggio and Montessori. She stressed that in these situations it is very important to understand the social environment in which the children are learning. It is also important to know the structure of the school and how it is run. ere may also be many specialized teachers Teaching Music to Young Children in Germany: Thoughts & Tandem Projects Winter 2020 20 PAN PIPES

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