How to tune 140 ukuleles a day
Teaching music during the Covid pandemic has forced teachers to come up with new innovative ways of organizing materials, delivering lessons plans and efficiently using class time all while keeping students socially distant and not sharing any items. That’s a pretty tall order for an elementary school music room where instruments, books and writing supplies are typically shared. The ukulele has been my saving grace this year. All 140 of them. Obviously I was already sold on how awesome the ukulele is in the classroom, but I had no idea that it would be the perfect instrument for this unprecedented school year with all of the restrictions and NO SINGING allowed. That’s right, no singing at all. Music teachers say whaaaaatttttt??? With a little extra organization and planning, music class has still been great. Here’s how the ukulele made it happen.
1) Creative and accessible storage. At the end of the summer I found a whole bunch of shoe racks and pool noodles on clearance and my handy husband was able to use them to build me a whole bunch of inexpensive ukulele racks. We left a couple of centimetres between each storage slot to ensure the instruments wouldn’t touch. For additional storage, we glued really strong magnets on the backs of the other ukuleles so that I was able to stick them to the filing cabinets and the magnetic whiteboards. This created more storage without taking up more floor space. Another thing to consider was how many students from each homeroom would be walking to each storage rack. I had to make sure I spaced them out around the room so that the kids would maintain social distance while retrieving or putting away their ukuleles.
2) Label everything. Everything. Kids (and teachers!) will forget. I know I can’t remember where all 140 instruments go and who they belong to. I labelled the storage slots, the ukuleles, the magnetic spots and I also put removable labels with the students name and homeroom on each uke. This homeroom label also proved to be crucial in saving me tuning time!
3) Tune while “teaching.” I couldn’t tune on the fly once the students had their instruments in hand as that would be too much cross contamination or I’d spend half the class washing my hands. I had two options; Get to school really early in the morning to tune all 140 instruments at the start of the day or find a way to tune them at the start of each class. Since getting up at 5am wasn’t that appealing to me I chose the latter. Now the question of how to tune and “teach” at the same time. Video lessons were the answer. I created my own short instructional videos to use at the start of class. It’s usually a simple dance routine to a fun song, or a rhythm game. And I’m able to reuse these videos for multiple classes over many weeks. While the video version of me is instructing the students, that gives me a chance to make sure the ukuleles for that class are tuned and ready to go. Remember the homeroom label I mentioned earlier? With the homeroom and student name visible, I can quickly walk around the room and instantly identify which ukes I need to grab and tune for that specific class. Maybe you’re not into making your own videos? There are lots of great video resources out there including James Hill’s Teacher Toolkit which can provide a short video lesson or demonstration for your class while you get your instruments tuned up and ready to go. James Hill has been my “guest teacher” many times this year while buying me a little extra time at the start or end of class.
And that’s how I tune 140 ukuleles a day.