Our Young Fives culminated our color learning this week by adding parachutes to our songs and movements! Look at all of those genuine smiles! Do you remember playing hand-clapping games when you were a kid? This week, the Fourth Graders were introduced to "Miss Mary Mack" and we added a little bit of current flair - an avocado move. We also reviewed our treble staff note names and started an EGBDF project. Our two humanities classes played a bit of non-traditional rhythmic bowling, too!
Our Kindergarten students got to go on a leaf hunt this week! We sang our leaf song with scarves inside the classroom on the first week, and then the second week, it was so much fun to go outside and sing together while looking for leaves. After we found our leaves, we came back inside and looked at the leaves' characteristics to sort them. Third Grade this week participated in a quick review of ta, titi, and sh by looking at different Halloween rhythms - pumpkin, apple cider, etc. - and added xylophones to a game that we love to play, called Charlie Over the Ocean. Our lovely Second Graders worked on notation this week, by practicing identifying and writing ta (quarter note), titi (eighth notes), and shh (quarter rest) on whiteboards with markers. We also played along to a Mario Theme Song rhythm! Our First Graders started working on singing our hello song in Chinese this week! We also did lots of movement to Halloween songs (Monster Mash, Spooky Scary Skeletons, and the theme song from Ghostbusters) and passed the pumpkin to the steady beat. We also worked on identifying the rhythms for Leaves Are Falling from last week. This week, our Fifth Graders started learning about hip hop! We discussed the history of hip hop, how it got started, where it got started, and so much more - see the students' notes below and a photo of the learning from a video of a DJ using turntables. We will continue this learning next week.
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This week, our King Elementary family was treated to a visit by author Supriya Kelkar. From her website: "Supriya is an award-winning author, illustrator, and screenwriter who grew up in the Midwest, where she learned Hindi as a child by watching three Hindi movies a week." Ms. Kelkar spoke to our learners about the process of writing a book as well as read her newest book, published just on Tuesday: Brown Is Beautiful. It is a gorgeously illustrated book that follows a young girl as she walks through the woods and notices the wonderful things about the color brown. You can find the book here! In our classes, we read Ms. Kelkar's book and learned a song that I wrote to accompany the book. We talked about affirmations (cue the social-emotional learning connection!) and created musical sentences with the class' work. You can hear a recording of the song below: Some examples of the affirmation-based songs that our classes came up with: Our Fifth Graders spent time analyzing the differences and similarities between a song from the hit musical Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda and a song used in social studies class called "Hit the Seas." Each class had a great discussion about things they liked/didn't like, as well as the differences between a play, a musical, and an opera. See our collection of thoughts in the pictures below: This week, the First Graders added xylophones to "The Farmer and the Dell" and also worked on moving our bodies. We used some movement cards and played a version of musical chairs. Among continuing our "animals in the zoo" work, our Young Five's worked on our scarf skills this week - so much fun! Our 2nd Graders continued to honor National Hispanic Heritage Month by reading a book by Lucky Diaz about his neighbhood, called Paletero Man. It is a beautifully illustrated book with lots of bright colors, and a fun song to match! We turned some common phrases into musical patterns and learned the rainbow's colors in Spanish. If you visit this page, you can hear Lucky Diaz sing the song on SoundCloud. This week, our Kindergarten learners continued our leaf learning by turning our leaf projects into music! We created an "AB" song with our leaf rhythms being the B section and our new song about leaves as the A section. We sang the song, then read a student's rhythm, then repeated the song, then a new student's rhythm. This way every student got many opportunities to practice their notation pre-reading as well as showing their steady beat. The song sounds like this: Leaves are falling all around. Falling, falling, to the ground. Leaves are falling all around. When they fall they make this sound! Our Third Graders continued their work on our musical books, and some classes also got to write an affirmation song. We made sure that each affirmative word was meant in a positive way about themselves, and made some great discoveries about ourselves and our friends.
Check out Mrs. Vosters' and Ms. Robertson's classes below: Fans of TikTok, beware! The infamous "Corn Song" has made its way to the music classroom. Below are two videos we used in our 4th Grade Humanities this week, drawing connections between the Internet and our classroom instruments. We used the Boomwhackers and drums as prescribed in the video, but also added our C chord from our ukuleles! Enjoy!
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Mrs. BergerTeacher, parent, dog mom, traveler Archives
March 2024
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