The Formative Five
What are the formative five?
- Empathy- understanding how someone else is feeling
- Self Control- to be in control of your actions
- Integrity- to believe and act on a set of morals or values
- Embracing Diversity- appreciating differences in one another
- Grit - perseverance
Why are we learning these skills?
Over the next year your students will be working on developing these skills to be lifelong assets to them. Many students find that they lack in certain areas when it is too late, especially in the every changing technological world we live in. I see that many of my students are not sure of what these things are and I think it is important to teach them and nurture these skills at a young age so that they can be successful members of society. Not only do I want your students to be musically competent, I want them to be socially and emotionally competent and have the skills needed to be successful in life.
What does this mean?
Throughout the year your student will be incorporating these skills into their projects and activities in the classroom. The students will be keeping a journal of their thoughts. I will be providing as many opportunities for the children to practice these skills. For example, I will be showing and using many different types of world music as well as different story books in my teaching to help students embrace diversity. I will be leading discussions on grit and using different composers to showcase this skill (this will be tied to their composition unit and will be a separate grade and rubric to focus on not giving up). We will be doing many different self control activities in the beginning of the year with our drumming circles. Students will play games that focus on response time and taking turns. Last but not least, students will be creating a sound track to a book focusing on empathy. They will have to come up with music that expresses how the characters might feel at different times in the book.
How can we build these skills at home?
Learning these skills is about creating a culture of understanding and growth. To help your child work on these skills at home you can do many easy activities:
1- read books and discuss how the characters may feel at different points in the book, discuss how they would feel in that same position
2- practice mindfulness- focus on your breathing and calm your body and mind. Meditation and yoga are great for this! Practice positive self talk, while you are doing this!
3- Discuss responsibility and honesty, read and identify characters that are honest, discuss with your child how they would respond in situations that require honesty.
4- read stories, watch movies, listen to music of different cultures! Try a new food from a different country or area! When your children see you opening up and embracing it, they will feel safer doing so as well.
5- try to learn something new (and hard!) - think of learning to dive, ride a bike with no training wheels, or learn to do a kart-wheel. Also, reward positive failures. Positive failures are times when your child may fail but they are learning, they don't give up and they keep trying. Failure can be scary but it's not a bad word. We learn from failure, we grow from failure, we don't sink.