This week, most of our King students focused on learning about The Nutcracker, a ballet written by Pyotr Tchaikovsky ("Peter Chai-cough-skii") who lived from 1840-1893. We talked a lot about how athletic ballet dancers have to be to be able to perform at such a high, demanding level! In between clips, we also worked on some rhythms, sang some solfege melodies, and tried to do the Russian kicks. It's harder than it looks (see below for a 3rd Grade class' try!). A funny for the week: "Ahhhh, now I know why it is called a nutcracker!" - third grade student, after hearing that the shells need to come off of nuts before consumption. A first grade class' attempt at the Trepak kicks: Second grade's kicks were pretty good, too! The Fourth and Fifth grade students also spent some time watching and discussing the Hip Hop Nutcracker, which can be seen here. The athleticism of the dancers in both the Nutcracker Ballet and the Hip Hop Nutcracker is just astounding! If you'd also like to see the movie version that we watched a portion of in class, click here. It is from 1993 and stars Macaulay Caulkin (Kevin from "Home Alone," as many students recognized!). Our youngest students spent time with snow and snowflakes - in Young Fives and Kindergarten, we continued our song from last week: Snow is falling all around, Falling, falling, on the ground. Snow is falling all around, When it falls, it makes this sound! We added scarves and dance moves, and then added it to the book The Perfect Snowflake illustrated by Jacqueline East. Our second class for the youngest learners focused on The Nutcracker as well, and the students had a great time playing a long to the Nutcracker March with jingle bells, rhythm sticks, triangles, and scarves.
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This week, all of our students spent some time making music that revolved around Thanksgiving and Hanukkah. Over the next few weeks we will learn about some holidays that are celebrated in our community and how they all involve LIGHT. Second and Third graders learned and then accompanied the song "Hanukkah Is Here" while playing the finger cymbals and the xylophones. The lyrics are: Hanukkah is here, it's wintertime at last. Candles burning bright and dreidels spinning fast. Fourth Grade spent the week learning about the song "Over the River" - it is a Thanksgiving song, not a Christmas carol as it is commonly thought! Students created their own verse to add to the original twelve - see below for each class's version, where the students had a lot of fun putting them together. We also spent some time dissecting the form of the verses - ABAC - which the students incorporated into their own versions. Then, we learned how to play the song with Boomwhackers. All of the classes' lyrics were quite creative!
Fifth Grade students continued their work with Your Name Is A Song from our last lesson together, and instead of creating their name as a song, we turned their names into rhythms. Each student then combined with another student, then that pair combined to make a quartet, and had to formulate a pattern where each name was heard at least four times. Here are a few examples from some brave souls:
Our First Graders learned how to play the finger cymbals, and how to add it appropriately to a calm song like Hanukkah Is Here. Below from the left, going clockwise: A photo of one of our first grade classes sharing their finger cymbals with a partner while singing our song. Then the students worked together to put different parts of the song (scarves, singing, finger cymbals, and humming) using "blocks," then a video of one of our first grade classes performing their scarf movements. Our Young Fives and Kindergarten students learned a song called "Snow Is Falling" and we used scarves to show the snow moving. You can watch Mrs. Kairys' class below (the little giggle at the end is only a representation of the giggles that happen in our classroom, and is so sweet!!): A big THANK YOU to our King Elementary PTO for making the purchase of the scarves possible through this year's mini grants! We will also see improvements to our xylophones (mallet storage, repairs to broken pegs and cords) as well as new instruments coming soon!!
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Mrs. BergerTeacher, parent, dog mom, traveler Archives
March 2024
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