This week, we celebrated National Hispanic Heritage Month in all of our classes! King students read a book called Paletero Man by Lucky Diaz (illustrated by Micah Player) and did lots of activities. This week, I was camping with our Fifth Graders at the Howell Nature Center. It was a blast! Here's our dance party from the second night we were there:
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This week, our Fourth Graders put several lessons together to sing in harmony! We have been learning about syncopation with I Want to Rise and Wake Me, Shake Me. This week, we put them together and the video above is the result from one of our classes. Good job, fourth graders! You can see that we are learning about notation, too - half rests and half notes. We're a busy group! Fifth Grade finished up our Your Name Is A Song project and started pivoting towards our grade-level camp experience next week. While at camp, the students will have many different opportunities, including singing around a campfire! We learned some campfire songs, including On Top of Spaghetti, Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree, and There's A Hole In My Bucket. Young Fives continued our bee learning this week. We also added a new alphabet song, with our names in it! The picture above is of us playing the rhythm sticks along to the song, Flight of the Bumblebee.
First Grade continued our steady beat learning and we added tennis balls! Then, we used our tennis balls to show the steady beat while we listened to Stars and Stripes Forever. Check out our work above. Our Second Graders spent some time this week reviewing ta, titi, and shh. We then played a game where the students could earn points for reading a rhythm correctly, and the teacher would earn a point if the rhythm was read incorrectly! Thankfully, the students won each time, proving that they were ready for the next level: playing the game on the xylophones. They did great! Next week, we will add more challenging levels - wish our students luck! This week, the Third Graders continued their work with Mary Had A Little Lamb and their variations. This was the week to finish their recordings and submit so that we can create a class song of "Theme and Variations" based on Mary Had A Little Lamb. Keep tuned to hear how they all turned out!
This week, our Third Graders have kicked off a big project. We learned about "themes" and "variations" by singing "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," "Baa Baa Black Sheep," and the alphabet song. Did you know that all three have the same melody, which is attributed to W.A. Mozart? Students sang the song and then write it down using their ears- listening to the bells and deciding which notes match the melody. Then, they colored in the boxes to match the bells that they were using. This form of notation is super accessible to all of our students, especially for the next step: composition. During the second class, students used blocks that are the same colors as their bells to create their own melody for "Mary Had A Little Lamb." Next week, we'll start recording these in Soundtrap and share them with each other! Our Fourth Graders started to learn about syncopation this week. We define syncopation is a "ti-ta" pattern, which we identified from the song I Want to Rise, an African-American spiritual: I want to rise in the early 'morn. I want to rise in the early 'morn. I want to rise in the early 'morn, And I'll never sleep late any more. We also took our song from last week and sang it outside while doing the dance. Some classes got to as many as six simultaneous circles! Our Fifth Graders gathered their My Name Is A Song work and posted it in the hallway. Check out their work here: Our Young Fives have been focusing on bumblebees. We make buzzing noises with our mouths, move our bodies like bees, and sing lots of bee songs! This book is one of our favorites - it doesn't have any words but tells a sweet story about a bee and her new friend.
First Grade has been focusing on steady beat. We have listened to many different songs to keep the steady beat with, and even used steady beat sticks (pool noodles) which were so fun! Our favorite song to keep the steady beat to is called Stars and Stripes Forever, which we listen to from this video. We are also starting to learn about notation, and we will be using the song The Muffin Man to help us learn. Do you know the muffin man, the muffin man, the muffin man? Do you know the muffin man, who lives on Drury Lane? An exciting part of Second Grade in the music classroom is learning about the instruments of the orchestra! We began this unit of study by learning about the families of instruments with our new friend, George: A note: usually, I try to include pictures and videos of our student musicians in action. However, since we do not yet know who is able to be pictured, I have only shared videos of myself and of our voices. As I receive the information needed, I will begin to add visuals!
Our Young 5 and Kindergarten learners this week really highlighted adding music to literature. We reviewed our work from last week with Pete the Cat: Rockin' In My School Shoes by Eric Litwin and illustrated by James Dean, and added egg shakers. Then, we read a new book by Eric Litwin called Groovy Joe: Ice Cream and Dinosaurs that was illustrated by Tom Lichtenheld. This time, we added hand drums to our song! It can be so very tough to practice rest position but our students are doing a wonderful job.
Our First Graders began the week by focusing on steady beat. We learned a rhyme: I think music's neat. I can keep a steady beat. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 We practiced this rhyme with our voices and bodies in many different ways. We even added steady beat to a song from Ireland called "All the Way to Galway" and to the book, Panda Bear, Panda Bear, What Do You See? by Eric Carle and Bill Martin Jr. Then we finished the steady beat mini-unit by starting to write our steady beats on the whiteboard while playing drums and speaking the pattern. This week, the Second Grade students learned the traditional song "Hickory Dickory Dock." This was a great opportunity to expand upon knowledge that some students had while introducing the song to others, and then bring our knowledge of the song further together. We identified movement/direction words (ran, up, down) and rhyming words (hickory/dickory, dock/clock), which we then paired with glockenspiels and rhythm sticks, respectively. We added hand drums to show the clock count, and rotated through each instrument so each student got the chance to play three different types of instruments! Then, as if that were not enough, we created our own A/B/C/D patterns and performed the entire arrangement.
3rd Grade started our musical journey this week by learning about a folk tale from Japan called "The Stonecutter." We then reviewed how to play "Rock, Paper Scissors" (the hand game) before learning how to play it in Japanese. Then, we learned a song and a circle game that goes with the hand game and had so much fun! 4th Grade learned yet another song about Sally - ask any fourth grader and they will tell you that we learned a lot of Sally songs in third grade. This song goes like this:
Sally go round the sun, Sally go round the moon, Sally go round the sunshine, every afternoon. We added xylophones, a contra bass bar, triangles, and some intense dancing circles (up to four at one time, each going a different way). Then, at the end of our time together, we did a quick rhythm review of quarter notes, eighth notes, half notes, and quarter rests. We then played our first round of, "I Have, Who Has?" - we will continue to play this game throughout the year to see if we can get our time down. This week, the class with the quickest time was 6 minutes and 6 seconds! |
Mrs. BergerTeacher, parent, dog mom, traveler Archives
March 2024
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