3rd Grade: Ukuleles Third graders have continued working on playing the four open strings on the ukulele, and are just starting to use their left hand fingers to play notes using the frets. This is a big step! The students are doing a great job of paying attention to their hand positions as they use the frets and developing good habits. 2nd Grade: Melody Second graders learned about phrases in this class. Phrases are like musical sentences. When phrases are put together, they can make a song, just like when sentences are put together, they can make a story. Students practiced identifying the phrases and how long they were in a couple of songs, then focused on the song "Great Big House in New Orleans." They learned how to sing the song by practicing it several times, replacing "pumpkin pie" in the lyrics with their own favorite kinds of pie. Then they collaboratively wrote a rhythm to clap during the instrumental B section of this AB form song. During the A section they did a movement activity that showed the phrases, then during the B section they froze and clapped the rhythm. We also added an accompaniment on Orff metallophone and students took turns playing it while the rest of the class sang, clapped, and moved! 1st Grade: Notes and Rests First graders have been learning about rests (silence) vs. sound (notes) in music. In this lesson, we began with an echo-clapping song. Students would listen to the rhythm in the song and echo it. This is challenging, especially when dealing with rhythms that include rests, but the students were great listeners! Then we looked at how those rhythms looked written out in notation. We tried it again and the students found that it was easier to clap the correct rhythms when both listening and looking at the notation. Of course, people can learn to play music by ear, but knowing how to read music too just adds another tool to make it a little easier! Then we switched gears to consider the pitch of notes (how high or low they sound), reinforcing the concept that notes contain these two pieces of information–rhythm and pitch. The first graders enjoyed singing a favorite old song, "Lunch Box Song," while looking at the rhythm and pitch of the notes. Kindergarten: Tempo
Kindergartners continued learning about tempo, which is the speed of the beat in music. In this lesson, we talked about how to pick the "right" tempo. Usually, when the speed feels comfortable, the music sounds the best. We explored this with the familiar song "Bingo." We tried a version that was very slow, another that was very fast, and then a comfortable medium tempo. We discussed how we get different feelings from the same song when the tempo is different. For example, students said that the slow version made them feel sleepy, relaxed, calm, or sad. The fast version made them feel happy, crazy, and excited. It's amazing how much just changing the speed of a song can change the feeling it gives us!
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