Uke can do this too!

Marci Low, at Endeavour Elementary, has started to teach Ukulele to her upper grade students for the first time.  Marci is a new music teacher this year at Endeavour and recently took an 8 week class through the community ed program to learn how to play the Ukulele for herself before she taught it.  Talk about a go getter!  That class has really paid off for Marci and I was so impressed when I visited her.

I loved the way Marci showed her kids how to finger a chord.  She used the Docu-cam!

What a great close up way for the kids to see where to put their fingers....and how.  

Marci sang some cute songs with the kids including Wheels on the Bus and Singing in the Rain which used only the F and C7 chord.  She talked to me a little bit about how the first week she taught she used the beginning chords she learned in her class and realized that when kids sang to those chords the songs were pitched way too low.  So she spent some time putting those songs in new keys and teaching new chords to her kids so they were pitched better.  These two chords put the songs in the perfect key for the kids and were easy to move back and forth from.  Here are some 4th graders with singing in the rain.

When Marci's younger grades came to class that day she was teaching about the notes in the scale and how the notes move up and down in steps, skips and jumps.  The kids practiced singing the scale in steps using this cute song about Hot Dogs...

Each phrase is sung on a different note of the scale until the end when it descends all the way down.

Marci had the classes do a shared writing activity on the board and create their own verse using the same form.  I thought it was funny that 2 separate 1st grade classes wrote about Star Wars...but maybe not too unexpected...

My favorite line is "A wookie rides a horse"!  Here they are singing it as a class...

Thanks for sharing your day with me, Marci!