Elementary music teacher stresses the importance of well-rounded students

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of stories celebrating Music in our Schools Month, which is in March.

From the time she walked the halls of her junior high school, Kathy (Reece) Johnson knew without any doubt that she had a knack for music and wanted to become immersed in it for the rest of her life. She just had to decide whether she would make it a profession or a hobby.

Johnson also loved sports at an equal level to music. She grew up at a time that Dallas Center-Grimes was small, so now that she teaches music at Nodaway Valley Elementary School, which is small itself, she’s able to draw on her own experience of participating in all activities to encourage students no matter their preferred niche. Most of all, she loves giving all students a strong musical foundation they can use later in life.

Johnson started her career in 1990, and other than Interstate 35 and Nodaway Valley, her time teaching has been mostly at larger school districts. She taught for three years in Illinois and the rest of the years have been in Iowa.

Johnson has a bachelor’s degree in music education from Simpson College, as well as some seminary training from Bethany Theological Seminary, now located in Richmond, Indiana.

In an age where it may seem like sports is king, Johnson doesn’t think it has to be that way.

“That’s the beauty of a small school, that you can do both. I always did both. I went to state in golf and I played on all the sports teams,” she said. “Having the great support from the community is fantastic.”

One key piece of that community support has come from Greenfield alumna Sue Campbell Shepard, who along with her late husband Don Helgeson, provided a generous gift to the Greater Greenfield Community Foundation focused on elementary school music.

This gift provides a year-on-year amount for the Nodaway Valley Community School District to enhance the elementary music program starting in the 2024-25 school year.

Shepard, now of Sartell, Minnesota, was born and raised in Bridgewater, but then her family moved to Greenfield, where she graduated from high school in 1958.

“This grant is something I haven’t ever heard of or experienced in other towns,” Johnson said.

Shepard’s gift allowed the NV music classroom to transition from a noticeably out-of-tune acoustic piano to an industry-standard electric piano. The donation has also allowed the purchase of a PA system for the music classroom and a Clever Touch smart board, which gives way to a host of technological opportunities.

“Through that, we can be on the cutting edge of recorder methods — that’s the small flute-type instrument — or ukulele methods,” Johnson said.

When she began teaching at NV in 2022, Johnson said that she inherited good singers from past music teachers. Her goal since then has been to develop them into even better singers.

On the vocal music side, Johnson praised middle and high school vocal music teacher Nicole Miller, and said it is her honor to feed students into her program, where they’ll get “top-notch instruction.”

The donation has also allowed the school to purchase a new music curriculum, called the Essential Elements Music Class, that is currently changing. It uses new music releases all the time. The publisher of the curriculum is the same company that owns Disney, so many of the songs available through the curriculum are familiar to students.

“The curriculum has some vocal warmups that the kids really love. They ask me if we can do that warmup or this warmup. There’s some body percussion as well. The new releases [the curriculum provides] is relevant music,” Johnson said. One example is the song “I’m a Believer,” first released in the 1960s by The Monkees but later made famous by the band Smashmouth in the 1990s.

“They were loving and grooving to that,” Johnson said. “I have three kids who are all in their late 20s. I have slacked on watching Disney movies in the last decade, so I have to catch myself up.”

Johnson teaches kindergarten through fifth grade students twice weekly and pre-kindergarten students weekly.

Teaching students to sing, matching pitch is the first skill Johnson tries to impress upon them. Moving forward whether in the classroom or on stage, her next goal is to place them in situations musically where they’re able to be comfortable, confident and successful.

“I tell the kids early in the game that I will never let them embarrass themselves on stage. If we’re having a concert and they have a problem, I’ll come sing with them, give them the words or whatever they need,” Johnson said. “We try to make sure this is a safe place to learn to sing and be the best singer you can be, but it’s always a safe place to make a mistake. Almost everyone of my father’s generation has a story about a music teacher who said something harsh to them, and it turned them off to music.”

Also a lover of literacy, Johnson has been involved with literacy interventions at the school here. She is researching ways to tie music and literacy together in the classroom. One of the things she has discovered is that music is literacy.

• Children who can keep the beat have improved fluency in language

• Reading a text more than once is a proven strategy to improve reading fluency, so what better way than to learn a song?

• In music, students practice discrimination between pitches, types of voices, inflections, high/low and loud/quiet.

• Decoding symbols, letters, words and sentences, visual focus and visual memory are all part of music and literacy.

• Choral reading, repeated reading, echo reading and song reading are strategies to develop prosody. Learning songs improves fluency in language.

• Fingerplays, chants and action songs are important tools to help children develop fluency and rhythm in language. Children learn new vocabulary, comprehension and fine motor skills as they show with their hands what the words mean.

• Songs teach many concepts: alphabet, counting, cultures, basic skills and more.

“There is a lot of crossovers between music and literacy,” Johnson said. “I’m just in the beginning stages of studying that, but maybe when I retire I can make that my thing, to look into how we can implement that into schools.”

Whether students can or can’t match pitch, Johnson always tries to foster a sense of belonging within the context of a music group.

“Getting up to sing in front of people, a lot of people would rather have their arm cut off,” Johnson said. “I try to give them successful experiences and never leave without some safety net. They may be walking the wire, but I’m right there next to them and would never let any of them be embarrassed.”