This week, students began preparations for their spring concert. The spring concert will be on Thursday, May 11th at 6:30pm in the high school gym.
Fourth graders, as the oldest students on this concert, take the lead in planning. They have chosen the theme of "Emojis" for this concert. All of the grades are in the process of choosing songs that they would like to perform that can be represented by emojis. They've been picking out a good variety of pieces that will show the skills and knowledge that they've gained over the last school year. It will be an exciting and entertaining program!
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5th Grade & 4th Grade Fifth and fourth graders have been studying the Baroque period of music history (1600-1750). They learned about composition techniques and styles, especially ornaments like trills, turns, and appoggiaturas, which made the music sound very fancy and decorated. They also learned about some important and prominent instruments of the period, including the harpsichord and recorder. There were many important composers in this period, but we focused on Antonio Vivaldi in honor of our classroom composer houses. Vivaldi's most famous piece is probably "The Four Seasons." Students took a quiz on what they had learned at the end of this week, and did impressively well on it! 3rd Grade Third graders have started a new recorder unit on tempo. They are learning the Italian terminology for music tempos, or speeds. Largo means slow, moderato is moderate, and presto is fast. These tempo markings can also be modified by adding the word molto, which means very. They are putting these tempos into action with their newest recorder song, "Level Up," which includes four different tempos as the song gets faster and faster. It's a challenge! 2nd Grade Second graders are also finishing a unit on the Baroque period. Like the older students, they have been learning about composition techniques and important instruments. This week, they have been focusing especially on three Baroque composers and their most famous compositions: Antonio Vivaldi, George Frideric Händel, and Johann Sebastian Bach. They have especially enjoyed learning about Vivaldi's hometown of Venice where there are waterways instead of streets, and about Bach's 21 children! 1st Grade First graders have been learning about melody and song this week. Melodies are pitches that follow one another in a song. A song is a musical story or poem. The students have been learning to identify the movement of pitches in a melody that go up, down, or repeat and they have been listening to and identifying different types of songs, including pop, folk, spiritual, and patriotic. Kindergarten Kindergartners are starting to learn about meter in music. Meter is the groupings of beats into 2s, 3s, or 4s. We have started with songs in a meter of 2, and students are really enjoying the new song they learned to practice feeling, singing, and playing this meter. It's all about stinky pirates!
The St. Cloud Symphony Orchestra will be performing a concert this Saturday, March 25 at 7:30pm at the Church of St. Augustine in St. Cloud. The program consists of music composed by French composers and features the Great River Chorale, soprano Anne Jennifer Nash, and organist Charles Echols.
The Program Debussy: Nocturne No. 2 (from Three Nocturnes), "Festivals" Poulenc: Gloria (with the Great River Chorale and soprano solist Anne Jennifer Nash) Saint-Saëns: Symphony No. 3, "Organ Symphony" (with organist Charles Echols) I hope you'll be able join us to hear this touching and expressive music that is a collaboration of so many groups and musicians. Ticketing information can be found on St. Cloud Symphony's website: http://www.stcloudsymphony.com/concert-season--tickets.html 5th Grade: Notation (Dynamics)
Fifth graders continued to focus on notation for dynamics (volume in music) this week. They added their own dynamics to a song, then sang it using those dynamics, and edited what they wrote to ensure that the dynamics they wrote made musical sense and helped communicate their meaning. They practiced their aural skills by listening to a song while following along with the sheet music, writing in the dynamics that they heard. They also completed a journaling activity on Modest Mussorgsky's dynamic-rich "Pictures at an Exhibition." 4th Grade & 3rd Grade: Blues and Recorder Students are continuing to play music using the BAG notes on recorder. This week, they began playing "Recorder Shuffle" which includes some tricky skips between the notes B and G. They took a Plickers quiz on blues, and did very well on it! 2nd Grade: Pentatonic Improvisation and Baroque Period Second graders reviewed what they had learned about the pentatonic scale, which is a series of five notes including the pitches do, re, mi, sol, and la. This scale works very well for improvising (making up music on the spot). The students sang the song "Makin' It Up" while taking turns improvising instrumental interludes on our Orff xylophones and metallophones. Second graders also continued studying the baroque period, focusing on the techniques used to decorate a melody to make it sound fancier. They learned about trills, turns, and appoggiaturas and used the notation for these ornaments to "fancy up" a the familiar tune of "Mary Had a Little Lamb." 1st Grade: Melodic Direction First graders are starting their study of melody by working on aurally identifying notes that go up, down, or repeat. We used the songs "I'm a Superhero" and "I Had a Dog" to practice hearing, singing, and using motion to show repeating notes. Kindergarten: Long and Short Kindergartners have been learning about the musical opposites long and short. In "The Long and Short Song," they are getting practice singing long and short notes as well as identifying and creating non-musical long and short sounds. They composed their own rhythms using long (one beat) and short (half beat) sounds, and they sorted our classroom instruments according to the length of sounds they can create using a Venn diagram. Some instruments are hard to classify, so a lot of them ended up in the overlapping middle section of our diagram. |
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