Ms. Fitzpatrick has been teaching early childhood music since 2012.  She is a practitioner of Gordon’s Music Learning Theory (MLT) which is a researched based method for teaching music.  MLT posits that children learn music the same way that they learn their first language; an infant spends years listening before they speak and a toddler spends years speaking before they can read or write.  

 

Ms. Fitzpatrick’s Pre-K and Kindergarten classes are centered around the crucial listening phase. Students are exposed to a wide variety of tonalities and meters with activities that focus on beat and resting tone. In First Grade, students start to ‘speak’ and make musical responses relying heavily on echoing to help discern if their response sounds the same or different than the original.  In Second Grade students start to label the sounds that have become most familiar over the past years so that we have a common language to talk about music and describe ways of making music.   Third Grade is the culminating year of the music program, and PS 29 and students take everything they have learned in previous years and put them together for two final units where they produce the majority of the music: a chorus unit and a ukulele unit.

 

Outside of school Ms. Fitzpatrick is an avid singer and performer.  She performs with a NYC-based chamber choir, Tapestry. She is first and foremost a jazz singer, but at this point in her life she performs mostly for herself and her family.  Ms. Fitzpatrick is also a huge fan of funk and hip-hop music; anything that makes you get up and dance.