5th Grade: Notation Fifth graders have continued their unit on notation, focusing this week on dynamics. Dynamics are music markings that indicate how loud or soft the music should be. Students have learned about pianissimo (very quiet), piano (quiet), mezzo piano (moderately quiet), mezzo forte (moderately loud), forte (loud), and fortissimo (very loud), as well as crescendo and diminuendo, which indicate gradually getting louder and softer. The students have enjoyed starting music class by sharing their most recent QGroove compositions with their classmates! 4th Grade and 3rd Grade: Recorders & Baroque Period This week, third and fourth graders are working on a new fingering skill. They're still using only the BAG notes, but now they're learning to skip from B to G, which requires moving two fingers at the same time. We're learning a new song, "Recorder Shuffle," that uses a few of these B to G skips. We also backtracked a bit to review the baroque period this week. Students are able to identify a lot of the defining features of music in this period. It was typically very fancy, with a lot of special ornaments, and orchestras were much smaller than they are today and didn't have conductors. 2nd Grade: Improvisation & Baroque Period Second graders have been continuing their study of the baroque period of music (approximately 1600-1750). Have already learned a lot about the characteristics of music written at this time, and they have listened to Vivaldi's "Four Seasons." This week, they began studying Antonio Vivaldi in more depth, learning about his compositions and life. The students were especially interested in learning about his hometown, Venice, Italy. We also reviewed the pentatonic scale (a scale that contains only five notes), which is particularly well-suited to improvisation (making music up on the spot). Each students is getting a turn to improvise eight beats of music using a pentatonic scale on a xylophone or metallophone. I've been impressed by the variety of music the students are coming up with! 1st Grade: Melody & Performance We began a new unit all about melody in first grade this week. Melody is the tune of a song, the part you might sing or hum or get stuck in your head. We're starting by studying melodic direction, how the notes of a melody go up or down or repeat. Students explored this concept using SongBrush, a tool that allows us to "paint" music on the Promethean board, then hear what it sounds like. Different colors represent different instrument sounds that follow the direction of the line. We also had a performance day this week. Students were invited to volunteer to sing or play music that they had learned, or to make up music for their classmates. We were able to practice good performer and audience etiquette. The students really got into their performances and showed that they were listening carefully to the music they heard in their comments after each performance. We will continue to do in class performances whenever we have extra minutes in class. Kindergarten: Long and Short Sounds We started a new unit in kindergarten on yet another musical opposite. We've covered fast vs. slow, high vs. low, and soft vs. loud. Now the students will be learning about duration of notes by studying long vs. short. We began by connecting the concept of long and short to other areas of life, such as measurement of objects, distance between places, and length of time. They have started learning a fun song called "The Long and Short Song" that includes rapping, singing, and a wide variety of long and short sound effects!
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5th Grade: Digital Composition Fifth graders continued working with the composition tools on Quaver this week. They have completed two QGroove compositions, and began working with the QComposer tool. QGrooves use pre-recorded 4 beat sounds in a variety of instruments, styles, and harmonies. For their latest QGroove assignment, they have created three section pieces that include a major section, a minor section, and another major section. QComposer uses traditional music notation on a music staff. Students are becoming critical listeners and thinkers as they creatively structure their own music. 4th Grade and 3rd Grade: BAG Notes on Recorder Third and fourth graders had an Accordion Day in which they learned all about how the instrument works, and reviewed concepts of major vs. minor and meter through the bass button organization and playing techniques. They are mastering the BAG notes on recorder, by playing "Hot Cross Buns" and they are preparing to learn another piece using those notes, but with skips between B and G. 2nd Grade: Baroque Period Second graders also had a fun Accordion Day. They were very interested in how the instrument works, made some great observations, and asked thoughtful questions. They started a new unit this week on the baroque period of music, which was from approximately 1600 to 1750. We are starting by focusing on the popular baroque composer, Antonio Vivaldi. Students created some great artwork to describe what they heard in sections of his well-known "Four Seasons." 1st Grade: Lines & Spaces First graders finished their unit on lines and spaces with a Plicker quiz. They have been doing an amazing job of sight-singing their first three notes on a two-line staff: mi, sol, and la. I didn't learn to sight-sing like this until I was in college, but the first graders are showing that they are very capable readers! Kindergarten: Tempo Kindergartners learned a singing (and playing) game called "Acka Backa" and finished their unit on tempo (the speed of music). They have shown that they can sing, play, and move to tempos that are fast, slow, getting faster, and getting slower.
This week's Mysterment (Mystery Instrument) was the accordion! Many students guessed that the instrument they heard in the Tinker Polka video above was a harmonica or banjo. Harmonicas are closely related to accordions in how they produce sound, however, the banjo is not. The accordion is a member of the woodwind family, while the banjo is a string instrument. However, banjos are often heard playing folk genres similar to polka.
In honor of Adele's performance at last weekend's Grammy Awards, we watched Crazy Accordion Trio's cover of her song "Hello". This video gave students close-up views of how two different types of accordions work and an opportunity to compare playing techniques. 5th Grade: Digital Composition and Notation Fifth graders completed their digital compositions, and we took some class time to share their projects. The students had insightful feedback for each other, and were very supportive of each others' efforts and ideas. After going through the process of making their own decisions about instrumentation, style, and harmonies as composers, we listened to part of Franz Schubert's Symphony No. 5, which is this romantic era composer's only symphony that does not include clarinets, trumpets, and timpani. Students wrote about why Schubert might have made that instrumentation decision and their own opinions about that decision. We also continued our study of standard music notation by learning about music "roadmap" directions, such as D.C. al Fine and D.S. al Fine, which tell a player to return to an earlier played part of a piece of music. 4th Grade & 3rd Grade: Recorders This week we added the note G to our recorder repertoire, and focused on developing good tonguing habits. Tonguing is how notes are separated on most wind instruments by using the tongue to touch the roof of the mouth, stopping the stream of air going through the instrument. Students have no learned four songs, and are about to start learning the highly anticipated "Hot Cross Buns"! 2nd Grade: Melody Second graders have become composers, using what they have learned about melodies moving by steps, skips, and repeated notes. A brand new addition to our classroom is five strips of tape across the carpet that we call "the floor staff." We've been playing a game in which students act as notes by standing on the lines and spaces of the floor staff. One student stands on the left side of the staff, then calls on a classmate to be the next note in the melody, and directing that student by telling him or her to be a repeated note, or a step or a skip up or down. It was interesting to hear how much more melodic their compositions became when they heard what they had created so far played as each student was called on. I can tell these students have good ears for catchy melodies! 1st Grade: Lines and Spaces First graders also used our new floor staff this week as they moved between the notes sol and mi as they listened to music using those notes. They are getting impressively good at sight singing melodies (singing a tune from written music without having heard it before) using these two notes. They also learned a little bit about the treble clef (a symbol that indicates the pitches on a music staff), including how to draw them. Kindergarten: Tempo Kindergartners have continued to listen to, move with, and sing songs in different tempos, feeling how the speed of the steady beat can be different. We had some great discussion about how the tempo of a piece of music can affect the mood or feeling of a piece of music. The students enjoyed learning about how songs sound best when they are at a comfortable tempo by singing the song "Bingo" at speeds that were too slow, too fast, and just right. In honor of the third and fourth graders beginning to play the recorder, this week's "Mysterment" (Mystery Instrument) was the recorder. Most classes guessed that the recording they heard was of a flute or piccolo instead of a recorder. Both are great guesses, being in the same instrument family as the recorder and producing sound in a similar way. We watched a portion of the Vivaldi video and the Justin Bieber video below and discussed the long history of the recorder and its musical versatility.
5th Grade: Music Notation
This week, fifth graders took a break from their digital composition projects to review standard music notation. We played a thrilling team game that reviewed their recognition of notes and rests of different durations, reviewed the notes on the grand staff (treble and bass clef), and discussed why standard music notation is important and how it functions as a universal language for musicians all over the world. 4th Grade & 3rd Grade: Recorders Students now know three (and in some classes, four) pieces on recorder! They know two to three notes, and are building good habits of playing, including:
2nd Grade: Note Duration Second graders finished up their unit on note duration with some fun team games. We played Quick Draw, in which students had to draw whole, half, quarter, and eighth notes, and Note Relay, in which students had to identify notes by name. Both were very exciting! 1st Grade: Music Notation First graders completed their unit on string and percussion instruments this week, and began a new unit on music notation. They have learned a little about the history of the standard notation of notes written on a staff, an innovation that is attributed to an 11th century Italian monk named Guido d'Arrezo. Although a standard music staff has five lines and four spaces, first graders are beginning to read music written using only two notes written on two lines. They have been doing an impressive job of reading short melodies, hearing them in their head, then sight-singing (singing what is written without hearing it first) using the solfège syllables "so" and "mi." Kindergarten: Dynamics (Loud and Soft) Kindergartners have also started sight-singing (singing what is written without hearing it first) using the pitches "so" and "mi." Students have been reading graphic notation, noticing melodic direction in how higher notes are written higher higher on a page than lower notes. At the same time, they've continued studying dynamics, reinforcing their new musical vocabulary: forte (loud) and piano (soft). |
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