This week, we celebrated Earth Day in all of our music classes. Each grade level learned about Louis Armstrong's life and his song, "What A Wonderful World." We then connected it to Earth Day and how we can (and should) take care of the planet Earth. Some classes danced to Armstrong's song "Heebie Jeebies" with scarves, and some classes watched a small section of the movie Wall-E to identify Louis Armstrong's voice and trumpet playing. Wall-E is also a great movie to discuss during the week of Earth Day because of its theme (and use of music to tell the story!). We also looked at the lyrics of Armstrong's song, which were illustrated by the students and then turned into a book for each classroom's library. This is one of my favorite lessons to teach, because it involves one of my favorite musicians, a lovely song, and reading all in one! We also prepared for a presentation by Karim Nagi, who is a musician that shares his culture through instruments, singing, and dance. He has created a video presentation for our homeroom classrooms to watch sometime this week, so we did a little bit of preparation work in our music classes this week. You can learn more about him by visiting his website: https://www.karimnagi.com/ or by asking your student!
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As part of our year-long study on classical instruments and their families, this week we reviewed instrument families and how to sort the instruments. A great review activity was this coloring sheet, where instruments were colored according to their family: This week, the Third Graders have been reviewing our rhythms: quarter note, eighth notes, quarter rest, half note and sixteenth notes. We did a "Read the Room" activity and did hopscotch outside to take advantage of the springtime weather! The Fourth Graders continued their learning about the recorder - this week was our White Belt week. Every student that brought their recorder to class was able to earn their belt, which is an amazing accomplishment! [students who choose to keep their recorder at home are able to submit recordings of their playing via email or Schoology, or wait until the next class]
We also played a game called "Busted" which uses rhythms that we will see in our next recorder songs. Check out some Busted pictures below: Our Second Graders continued learning our Spring Songs, focusing on the spring festival of Holi. We used a song by a wonderful Chicago-area music educator named Manju Durairaj and added our own colored rhythms in between. The Third Grade students added xylophones to our Holi song with great success! Fourth Grade added dance moves from the style of Banghra dancing to our Holi song. Check out this class' great style! We also tested out lots of different tempos and unsurprisingly, most classes preferred the quickest speed possible even though it made us lose our breath! Fifth Grade students are continuing their ukulele learning by using online tutorial songs.
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Mrs. BergerTeacher, parent, dog mom, traveler Archives
March 2024
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