How To Organize Your Elementary Music Lessons With a Simple Filing System

Coming up with ideas for your elementary music lessons can be hard. Often I find myself staring at a blinking cursor and trying to think of just the right activity to fit my lesson for the week. But then I was scrolling Pinterest and came across a great idea from the Head Over Heels For Teaching blog.

Lessons for each of week of the school year, filed away in their own folder. Each folder was complete with lesson plans and needed resources.

Don’t Reinvent Your Elementary Music Lessons Every Year

This system was so simple and yet so brilliant. It’s so organized. And so easy! Just pop everything in the folder at the end of the lesson. I have been spending so much time doing my lesson plans for music, and as soon as I saw this, I realized that I have been reinventing the wheel every year. I mean, looking back, it seems so obvious to use your ideas from last year (and I do, but not in such an organized format).

Taking Your Lesson Planning Digital

I don’t use this EXACT formant for my classroom, but pretty close. The first difference is that instead of using actually physical folders, I keep all my lessons and resources in digital format. Also, since I only see students once a week, I instead organize my folders by unit. For example, I keep all my Carnival of the Animals materials in a folder on my computer – right down to the PowerPoint slides I will use to teach.

In addition, I type notes on my lessons such as:

• ran out of time for this activity
• this took twice as long as expected
• kids loved this
• kids hated this
• this was ineffective at teaching the concept
• this was awesome for teaching the concept

Reusing Music Lesson Plans Year After Year

Then, as I plan each quarter (click here to see the grid I use to plan lessons), I can plug in the awesome stuff, edit out the junk, and tweak until I have the PERFECT LESSON – cue angel music. Okay, we all know the “perfect lesson” is the unattainable dream that we continue to chase, but hey, maybe we can get close. You know what they say: Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars!

And, with the time I’ll save not having to rack my brain to recall how I processed out that awesome lesson last year, I could add new, awesome things to my classroom. Or maybe, I could just leave work on time and have a little me time. Don’t forget, avoiding teacher burnout is critically important too!