Michael Davis's Music is the Revolution ofers mini grants to K-12 music teachers. The application is a PDF file. Check it out!

If you spend a lot of time with your hymnal, you deserve a way cool personal hymnal marker.

I made a collection of little charms from microscope slides. Trace around the slide on some snazzy paper. Put together tiny collages on the paper and cut them out. Sandwich them between two ordinary microscope slides. Wrap them with copper tape. Solder them together and add jumprings.

Actually, if you don't solder, you could just use beads, or make your collages on blank wooden dominos, or use whatever your personal art form might be. I happen to make these slide charms, so I like to use them.

Next, buy a ready-made chatelaine in the needlework section of your local arts and crafts tore. A chatelaine has a central piece and five or so arms -- enough for three hymns and the "amen." Now you simply attach your charms to the chatelaine, and your hymnal marker is ready!

It;s easy to make special ones for different seasons, or to make them as gifts. Do you have someone really special in your choir who really deserves one?

The Kansas City Symphony joined music teacher Josepha Haden Chomphosy in her classroom at First Presbyterian in Liberty, Mo for an Instrument Petting Zoo. It helps to have an in -- Josepha sings with the symphony. But everyone can call their local symphony, high school or college band, or music store and ask for help.

See Josepha's specific instructions here.

It's one of the biggest issues for volunteer choirs: attendance. How do you plan music, check balance, and work on getting songs off the page when you never know who's going to show up?

I like this article on building choir commitment. The idea of building commitment is key. Attendance charts with stickers, sign-out calendars to encourage responsibility, and cookie breaks can also help.

What have you found that works?

Music is a language. I don't mean this in the abstract "the Language of Flowers" kind of way, I mean it literally. The basic ideas of opposites (loud v. soft, fast v. slow, et al) are like learning the basic sounds of your native tongue. Learning the specific parts of music (measures, note names, rest names) is like learning words of your language. Learning to read music (time signatures, key signature and the like) is like learning to construct sentences.

The process of learning music is a cumulative one.

Activities for Your Itty-Bitties
- Objective: Recognize the differences in loud, soft, fast, slow, high and low.
- Materials: Two adult helpers, one sign with a picture of a Quail and one that has a picture of Lion, assorted audio clips.
- Setup: Have each adult take a sign and stand on opposite sides of the room. Have the children stand in the middle of the adults. Play a clip of a highway and have the children move either to the Quiet Quail or the Loud Lion depending on how loud it is. Repeat this with clips of parks, solo flutes, orchestras and whatever else you can find.

You can follow up by using a Venn Diagram to catagorize your guided listening clips into groups.

In our choir room, the music is sort of alphabetized. Except that some of it is in the Easter drawer, and some in the Youth drawer, and some in --- well, suffice it to say, it's only possible to find music if you are privy to the original filer's inmost thoughts about that music.

Some of us want to switch to strict alphabetical filing, with a database to make it all easier.

The director doesn't agree. He likes to paw through the music, tasting it in his mind and reliving the last time he used it. It won't be the same on the computer, he thinks. Being able to go straight to the title would spoil some of the pleasure.

He would swim in it if he could.