ICDA Junior High/Middle School Choirs R&S

Lori Nielsen

Lori Nielsen graduated from Northwest Missouri State University with a BA in K-12 music education. She has taught vocal music for twenty-five years in Iowa. She currently teaches at Norwalk Community School District where she directs sixth grade choir, seventh grade choir, assists with eighth grade choir and middle school show choir. Lori also hosts the Norwalk Eighth Grade Choral Festival annually in the fall where around 500 students sing as a mass choir.
     Lori was nominated as “teacher of the year” for Norwalk Community School District and won the A&E Biography “Project Mozart” general music contest respectively in 2001. Her leadership responsibilities at Norwalk include being a mentor for young teachers at Norwalk and serving on various committees for the future growth of Norwalk Community Schools.
     From 2005 – 2007 she worked closely with curriculum directors leading the music department in revising music standards, benchmarks, performance indicators and purchasing thousands of dollars of new music and equipment.
     Most of all, the love of her job is working with middle school students and seeing them find their musical talent blossom into a future of wonderful opportunities.
     Please feel free to email Lori with suggestions or concerns of how to keep vocal and general music alive at the middle school level in the state of Iowa.

ICDA needs you!!!!!!!!

We are looking for middle schools that have had success in a certain musical activity to be featured in the Sounding Board magazine. Please email Lori at jhms-chair@iowachoral.org with your story.
Are you ready to step up to the podium and be a guest clinician or director at middle school festivals or honor choirs around the state?? Email Lori your resume and she will create a data base for schools to choose directors from.

Lori Nielsen
Junior High/Middle School Choirs Chair
jhms-chair@iowachoral.org

Junior High/Middle School Choir Events 2008-9
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See the ICDA Statewide Calendar for more event information

Sections of Interest:

Choral Music Hits
Great Junior High Literature — with repertoire ideas for study and performance
Things for Your Classroom — with suggestions for motivators, energizers, class activities, interdisciplinary projects, solfege, and classroom management
Getting Started Kit — with suggestions for new teachers on how to get started with the animal that is middle school/junior high choir
Choral-Friendly Web Sites — with various MS/JH reference sites
Successful Songs for Various Voicings (as presented by Brent Peterson at the 2005 IMEA convention)
Music Theory Activities
Advocacy Information

Arts Advocacy Quotation:

Elliot Eisner, Professor of Art and Education at Stanford University made the following observation:

"That the arts make substantial demands on those who would use them to make things expressive or lovely will come as no surprise to anyone who has seriously engaged in the arts. The arts — both in creation and in appreciation — require the use of our faculties of abstraction in order to make judgments about relationships that will submit to no crystallized rule. The exercise of judgment in the absence of rule is one of the art's most demanding requirements. Knowing when a painting is done, a poem is completed, or a dance is concluded requires judgment that can be resolved by fealty to no rule. Somatic knowledge must kick in if we are to know whether the relationships are right and the work is done."

"In the end, the arts make three things possible. First, they develop the mind by giving it opportunities to learn to think in special ways. Second, they make communication possible on matters that will not take the impress of logically constructed language. Poetry, after all, was invented to say what prose can never say. Third, the arts are places and spaces where one can enrich one's life. Such outcomes are not educationally trivial. When taken seriously, the arts have much to teach educators: they could provide the models needed to create schools that genuinely educate."

Iowa Choral Directors Association, Inc.

R&S: Junior High/Middle School Choirs

R&S Areas