Learning with Musical Accompaniment with Joey Bacon
This week’s Distance Learning Spotlight is the musical educator, Lower School Teaching Fellow Joey Bacon. Many of you may have heard of his musical lessons about animals or his theme song for this year’s Poly Pet and Hobby Show. Shifting to teaching remotely has impacted all of us and often inspires teachers to engineer creative teaching strategies to help support their students.
Joey reflects on this new era of distance learning and teaching. He says, “I am so fortunate to have an awesome and collaborative team in Kindergarten. Since distance learning began, we have developed our curriculum collectively to maintain that sense of grade-level community and maximize our capacity to engage student learning. Students get to see all of their kindergarten teachers in our educational videos. It’s been amazing to see my coworkers learning and honing new technologies on the fly for the benefit of our students. Everyone’s passion for teaching is on full display, and I’ve felt very inspired.”
Running a Kindergarten class online comes with its own set of interesting conundrums, as any lower school community member can attest to. Joey has rolled with the necessary evolution and adaptations needed to keep those young minds engaged. He says, ”We have found more than one silver lining in the radical shift to distance learning. Our students have absolutely risen to the challenge and made some incredible progress to end the year. They are resilient and determined, and that’s given us the motivation to keep going. We are using thematic teaching and project-based learning, which has allowed the students and the teachers to get creative.”
“Each week, Kindergarten focuses on a different class of animal. The music videos are a fun way to get the students excited about what they are learning, but we have tied our animal study to reading, writing, and engineering as well.” And you can see many of these lessons on his YouTube channel!
And what does Joey do when he is not penning and making music to dazzle his kindergarteners? He shares, “I have spent a lot of quality time with my family and dogs, who have put up with me recording songs (loudly) in the living room and volunteered to be production assistants for these videos. It’s been a blast integrating my love of teaching with all of my hobbies—music, writing, art, and comedy. Our students enjoy opportunities to use their imaginations, and I wanted them to see a sillier side of me and find some humor and brightness during this time.” And we have definitely been the thankful recipients of his talents and humor! Thank you, Joey, for sharing your gifts with the entire Poly community!
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