Happy New Year! Mrs. Rzasa and I hope you all had a fun and relaxing winter break. We can't believe it's 2015 already! It was so refreshing to see the students again and hear what fun things they did over the holidays.
The first graders sang a silly movement chant called, "Hands, Hands." We warmed up our cold bodies with moving just one body part at a time. I think we could all agree that one of our most favorite was singing and moving our tongue. We also sang a winter song called "I Have a Little Snowman." It explores movement and pitch in a scale. As the song continues, the pitch of the song rises, and when the snowman melts the pitch returns back to the starting note (do). To review the pitches of "Sol-La-Mi" we learned a fun song and game called, "Doggie, Doggie Where's Your Bone." One student played the part of the dog who was sleeping in the middle of the room while another student distributes the bone to one person in the room as the class sang the song. Whoever has the bone on the phrase, "Who stole the bone?" got to sing the solo part of "I stole the bone!" It was so fun to see students guessing who had stole the bone.
Second grade students learned a new musical term called, "tempo." Tempo is the speed of the music. We practiced listening and moving to various tempos with a song called, "Freight Train." Students also had a chance to conduct the tempo of the chant, "Engine, Engine Number 9" while the rest of the class sang or moved as trains to the tempo that was conducted. Here is a student conducting the class and the trains:
Our third grade students reviewed the notes of the staff by singing, "I Don't Know the Names" and playing the game, "On Your Mark, Get Set, Notate!" We were so happy to see how much the students remembered over the break! If you have not already brought in your permission slips for the recorder and for the Lexington Symphony field trip, please do so ASAP! They were due on Friday but we are accepting it on Monday! Our field trip is on Thursday, Jan 29th and we would love to hand out all the recorders after that. You are more than welcome to use your older sibling's Yamaha recorder! Just let us know!
The students in fourth and fifth graders learned a song for the New Year called , "Auld Lang Syne." The song is traditionally sung on New Year's Day, at midnight right after the ball drops. The song reminds us to remember our old friends and fond memories as we approach the new year. The song sounded great as we sang it, but it will sound even better with chordal accompaniment. Thus we also worked on building chords. A chord (unlike a pitch or interval) is a group of three or more pitches played at the same time. There are MANY different chords in the music world, but we focused on chords with three or four notes. We explored the different tonalities that the chords can possess, and a process for building a chord that will sound good every time! We practiced playing tone chimes this week and next week we will use them to accompany the song, "Auld Lang Syne"
Here are what tone chimes are:
Here are some 5th grade students playing the tone chimes:
We hope you have a fabulous weekend!
No comments:
Post a Comment