Kerry Renzoni
Program Director
Department of Music Education
Department of Music Education
It has been a busy week of teaching! This week, I had the pleasure of co-leading music instruction for the elementary school students at San Giovanni Bosca with the IPDS Italy students. We ran two music classes for PreK and Kindergarten students and led a music event for fifth grade students in an 800-year-old castle! Prior to the trip, IPDS students co-wrote books in both English and Italian, which all included a song at the end. For example, Christine and Krissy wrote a book about winter in Buffalo and included the song “Walking in a Winter Wonderland” at the end of their book. Moving from room to room, I was impressed with how the students co-taught, weaving music into their lessons beautifully. As I was observing the students teach, I noticed that the strategies they used to guide children in reading the book were similar to the strategies they used to guide children in learning to sing the songs. As I was observing the IPDS students teach, I noticed they used a contextual approach, reading the book in its entirety and singing the song in its entirety before breaking both down into manageable chunks. When the children struggled reading or singing the chunks presented, the IPDS students would break the content down into smaller chunks or slow the speed at which they repeated the words or music. Another commonality was that they would invite the students to read the book or sing a song in small groups or even by themselves. The fact that similar strategies can be implemented to teach both literacy and music was fascinating to observe and speaks to the potential parallels between language acquisition and music acquisition, and language literacy and music literacy.
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Dr. Kerry RenzoniI am Coordinator of Undergraduate Music Education and Associate Professor of Music at Buffalo State. I have been to Italy several times and this is my second time visiting Torremaggiore! Archives
January 2023
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