Professional opera singer and performer house leader Eryn Tvete visited music classes on Monday. The students were very excited to meet her, having learned about her and her music making throughout this school year. Eryn became interested in music at a young age and fell in love with opera in college. Since then she's sung in over 30 opera productions, including 21 as a member of the Minnesota Opera chorus!
Eryn told students about her background in music, taught about the fun of exploring different languages and stories through songs, and answered many thoughtful questions. She amazed students with her powerful and expressive voice as she sang a variety of songs of different styles, time periods, and parts of the world. She performed an impressive Italian opera aria, a fun German folk song (which she taught the students to sing along with!), a beautiful French art song, a classic Disney song of each class's choosing, and more. Each class ended with a performance of the song "No One Like You" from The Muppets, a song about appreciating the uniqueness of every person. It was so much fun to have Eryn in our classroom and to see how interested and inspired the students were by her music!
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3rd and 4th Graders will be starting their recorder unit next week! Please help students who have their own to bring their recorders to school on Monday. Students will keep their recorders at school during the week and will have the option of taking them home on the weekends.
5th Grade: Notation The fifth graders have been reviewing music notation that they have learned in past years, such as notes on a staff and rhythms, and are now learning some new, more advanced notation. They've been reading reading accidentals (sharps, flats, and naturals) and gained more understanding of how accidentals can make a major key into a minor key. They practiced this by playing major and minor triads (two notes a third apart) on piano and Orff instruments as an accompaniment to a song. Students also learned about "roadmap" notation that tells a musician how to navigate a piece of music. D.C. al Fine ("da capo al fine", or from the head to the end) means to go back to the beginning of the piece and play/sing until you reach the "Fine" written above the music. D.S. al Fine ("dal segno al fine", or from the sign to the end) indicates that the player/singer should go back to the point in the music where a "sign" is printed and continue from there to the "Fine." They did a great job of following both of these notations when singing the Ukrainian folk song "Minka"! 4th Grade: Duration Fourth graders have continued reviewing rhythmic durations, including whole, half, quarter, eighth, and sixteenth notes and rests. They also learned about dotted notes this week, which add half the value of the note they are attached to (for example, a half note is 2 beats, so a dotted half note is 2+1 beats). They also reviewed meter by identifying how the beats are grouped together in several music examples, then learned how to conduct for meters of 3 and 4. 3rd Grade: Sound Science Third graders have been enjoying learning about science in music class! Last week, students learned about how different instruments produce their sound, and this week we focused understanding how sound travels and how to analyze waveforms. They learned about two measurements of a soundwave: the amplitude, which measures the loudness of the sound, and the frequency, which measures the pitch of the sound. We did a few experiments with sound waves using a tuning fork in water and creating waveforms with a jumprope, then trying to make the sound that it showed. 2nd Grade: Melody Second graders have continued learning about the different ways that pitches can move in a melody: by step, skip, or repeating. We used "Ode to Joy" as an example of a piece of music that contains a lot of stepwise movement and learned about its composer, Ludwig van Beethoven. Students learned about and discussed the challenges that Beethoven had to overcome when he lost his hearing but chose to continue to follow his passion to make music. 1st Grade: Notes and Rests First graders have been reviewing two rhythms that they have worked with before: ta (quarter note, one sound in a beat) and ti-ti (eighth notes, two sounds in a beat). They have also added a new rhythm notation, the quarter rest, which indicates one beat of silence. They've been identifying, listening to, reading, singing, and playing rhythm patterns using these three notations. Kindergarten: Loud and Soft
Kindergartners have been learning about another musical opposite: loud and soft. We started by learning a song called "Mouse's House" which included references to sawing, hammering, and painting. Students determined whether each of those activities would be loud or soft, then we performed the song with singing that matched the volume of the activity. Students learned that the musical symbols for loud and soft are "f" and "p." The "f" stands for forte, which means loud, and the p stands for "piano," which means soft. Like many musical terms, these words come from the Italian language. Students used the symbols for forte and piano to arrange a rap with variations in volume to make it more interesting to perform and listen to. |
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