River Bend Teacher: Timing with music

I've finally come to terms with the idea that I need help staying on top of time. I am a habitually late person in recovery, slowly learning how regular humans do things on time. Every year I learn a little more. This year, I made myself a budget of every minute of my school day, not that we are anywhere close to that schedule in these first weeks of school. The other day, I even bought a watch. My transformation is nothing short of amazing. Just ask anyone who ever expected me to be anywhere between 1998 and 2010.

So to help myself and my students to stay on schedule, I have gone crazy with timers. I have Kagan timers, which are perfect for timing turns, but then I have to have them open on my computer all the time, which I usually forget. I got a magnetic timer from Scholastic that looks great, but only works about 30 percent of the time. But what I really like is a way to keep time that also keeps my students quiet and gives them some indication of when time is almost up. So I've been timing them with songs.

The ones below I like because they are low-key enough to not be too distracting, but interesting enough to keep them listening. If you have others, please let me know. Ideally I would love it if GoNoodle had a category like this, but until then, you can just bookmark this page and I'll keep adding videos. I can't vouch for the video content on all of these, so I wouldn't display them for the students, just play them on your desktop.

Pentatonix - Daft Punk remix. Some familiar songs with a little twist. About 5 min.

Zero 7 - among my favorite bands of all time. Super chill music. The few I have hear don't have the soaring vocals of the ones featuring Sia, which you should check out on your time. ;) Both of these are about 5 min.