Sigma Alpha Iota

12 Spring 2026 • sai-national.org SAI Philanries, Inc. When I decided to take Orff Schulwerk Level III training in Summer 2023, I intended to teach middle school band and choir the next school year. Little did I know I would receive an offer there to work at an incredible elementary school. During the course, I spent a lot of time figuring out how to take this methodology and make it work for my students. In the subsequent years, I transformed the classroom experience using the Schulwerk to create more joy with my students. They learned a lot, and we made sure to have fun. Students at my former middle school tended to be behind in reading by at least two grade levels. They received little to no elementary music education because of the difficulty of retaining a music teacher. Between 2018 and 2023, the students' elementary music experience went from one master teacher, to no elementary music teacher at all, to general education teachers who had varying degrees of musical knowledge—with the COVID-19 pandemic in between. I started from scratch with my seventh grade students and had to assume they knew nothing. The following points are things I have learned and taken from Orff Schulwerk Levels courses and have infused into my teaching to help students succeed, despite the shaky elementary music education they received. These outcomes and procedures are real and can be achieved, even in very daunting teaching situations. 1. CAREFUL SEQUENCING IS A MEANS TO AN END While I taught middle school band, I guided students into playing in three major and corresponding minor keys through careful sequencing. B-Flat Major was first, as it is the first major key introduced in our method book, Sound Innovations. Once students were comfortable with their first five notes, we learned "Low La" and "Low Ti" so they could have almost an entire octave of G minor at their disposal. This process continued with other keys as well. Daily warmups and continued exposure ensured they never grew uncomfortable in new-sounding keys. This process was also applied to time signatures and rhythms—all new notation was introduced in common time, and after students were assessed for reading fluidity, more complex times were introduced. Rhythms were introduced with a sound-to-sight approach, learning how new rhythms sounded before students were shown the notation. This allowed me to build their rhythmic vocabulary before I asked them to decode the rhythms (much like how we learn to speak and read). 2. STUDENTS CAN LEARN NEW AND COMPLEX MATERIAL EASILY, IF PRESENTED CORRECTLY Orff Levels taught me that you can get students to play almost any piece of music if you present it at their level. For my middle school students, this meant using the careful sequencing mentioned earlier to present tricky passages in increasingly more difficult ways until they could play what was written. The next step is to point out to students that what they just learned to play is in their music. I Lessons From Orff Levels Miranda Johnson Miranda Johnson in the classroom. in the classroom.

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