5th and 4th Grade: Ukulele Fifth and fourth graders are enjoying their ukulele unit, continuing to improve on the open strings and reading music. The classes continue to improve their high scores on our warm-up note reading game, Staff Champion. Ms. Murnane's and Ms. Smith's classes hold the record of being able to name 10 notes in 30 seconds! The students are getting more and more comfortable handling, holding, and playing the ukuleles. They've learned four short pieces that use only one open string and are beginning to learn one that uses all four open strings. This means they are able to read the notes while they play! Students have also continue to hear about well-known ukulele players. This time, we watched a video of Tiny Tim playing his most famous song, "Tiptoe Through the Tulips." Tiny Tim was most widely known for this kind of performance, but he was also a very influential experimental musician who inspired many other famous musicians, including The Beatles! 3rd Grade: Melody Third graders continue to work on improving their skills reading notes on the treble clef staff and learning about intervals. We worked more on "The Star-Spangled Banner" in this rotation. In the last class, we focused on understanding the lyrics. This time, we looked at the music and identified steps, skips, and repeating notes to understand how the melody moves. This song is challenging to sing because it includes many large intervals! After analyzing the music, we learned more about the background of the song. The lyrics were written by Francis Scott Key, who was a lawyer. During the War of 1812, he was sent to negotiate with the British Navy for the release of an American prisoner. He was able to convince the British to release the prisoner, but then they were told that they wouldn't be allowed to leave the British ship where the negotiations took place because the British were just about to attack Fort McHenry! Francis Scott Key had to wait on the British ship while Fort McHenry was bombed for 25 hours. During that time, he wrote a poem that would become "The Star-Spangled Banner" about his experience watching the battle and trying to see if the American flag was still flying at the fort. After the battle, Key and the prisoner were allowed to leave. Although the words were written in 1814, the song didn't become our national anthem until 1931.
1st Grade: Lines and Spaces This was an exciting and challenging day of music in first grade! Students have been working hard on their songs that use the three pitches they've learned–mi, sol, and la. After a short warm-up and assessment singing those three pitches, they sang "Shiloh," the song they learned in the last class that uses only those three pitches. Then we added three different Orff instruments (like xylophones) to create an accompaniment with the song! Students learned phrases to help them remember each instrument's unique rhythm, clapped the rhythms, and played them on the instruments. It's not easy to have several students playing three different rhythms AND listening to a song with another rhythm all at the same time, but I was very impressed by what they accomplished in their first try with layered rhythms! Kindergarten: Instruments Kindergartners continued their unit on the instrument families, focusing on the brass family. They learned about the parts and the sounds of the trumpet, trombone, tuba, and French horn. They showed what they've learned about both brass and woodwinds with an activity in which each student had a prop and a movement for either the trumpet or the flute. When they heard their instrument in a recording, they stood up and did their thing! Students representing the trumpet used a rhythm stick to pretend to play as a trumpet and marched with the music. Students representing the flute used ribbons to float through the air like the sound of the flute. Here's a video of The Canadian Brass that students watched in class.
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
September 2022
Categories
All
|