Over the course of the year I have heard from many of you about the difficulty in finding lessons and using the resources you have in your classroom. I have to say that I have faced the same dilemmas in past years. This year I have come to LOVE the USOE Songbook and I think it is your most useable resource. There are tons of songs and each song is outlined with a basic lesson plan. The outline is based on the four standards: singing, playing, listening and creating. There is a paragraph for each standard that describes how to use this song in your class. Here's what I've been doing lately...
The first thing I do is look through the book to find a song or group of songs that I like and feel like I can teach well to my class. The majority of songs in the USOE Songbook can be used in similar ways. Without looking at the outlines I know I can use most of these songs to teach steady beat, proper singing, playing simple instruments and solfege.
Next I read through the outline written for this song. I use a highlighter to highlight the parts of the outline I think I can use and easily accomplish in one or two class periods. This also helps me understand what grade levels would enjoy this song and activity.
This song also has a game to go along with it that is a lot like Duck, Duck, Goose. Sometimes that game can get rowdy in class. Make sure if you use it to set up some parameters for the kids to follow while playing.
I recently visited Jamie Stone at Buffalo Point Elementary and she was using this song in her class. She wanted to play the game but didn't like how it was set up. She decided to change it up a little bit.
Jamie had her students sit in a circle on the floor. She taught them the song and then introduced the game. She had a envelope, and in that envelope she had typed up different ways you could sing the song like: high voice, low voice, humming, like a robot, like a roller coaster, etc. What a great idea for vocal exploration! She had one student walk to the steady beat around the outside of the circle while everyone sang the song. At the end of the song, the student on the outside stopped behind another student and passed the envelope to them. The person who received the envelope got to choose a slip that said they way they would sing and then they became the beat keeper on the outside. The kids loved it and had a lot of fun with this activity.
Here a short clip of Jamie with her (hardest) 3rd grade class.
I love this song and activity and I have recently come to love the USOE Songbook and recommend you take some time to look through it and find some song and activities that you enjoy. Jamie has worked really hard and has become a pro at using this songbook with her class! Thanks for sharing Jamie!
Hi everyone! You all should have recieved a packet from the training in your email. If you didn't, please let me know. Or, click here: bit.ly/AprilTrainingPacket
Here's a link to the booklist:bit.ly/DavisBookList
This will be the updated version if any books get added.
Below is video and recap from the training, as well as some more in depth re-visiting of rhythmic notation.
Hello Music Students I didn't get video of this at the training, but if you go to this post and scroll to the last video, you'll see Jeanette Eggett in action.
How To Speak Moo
Here's How to Speak Moo, taught by Shanda Stenger, part 1:
and How to Speak Moo, part, 2.
I'm guessing some of you will want to buy a cow puppet. I went to Amazon and did a quick search, and this puppet was $8.68 and looks a lot like the one Shanda used.
Also, here's a link to purchase the book, How to Speak Moo.
I decided to rework the rhythmic notation process from how I did it at the training becuase I wanted it to be more accessible and easy to use. There's usually not one right way to do a given thing, and this definitely holds true for writing down notation. Below I'm going to go through a few different ways of composing or dictating a rhythm for an existing text.
EASIEST, options are more limited
I should have explained the notation could be done one syllable at a time, just like we did with the pitches. The pros of this is that is lends to more success if you aren't confident in deriving rhythms. It's proabably the easiest way to compose a rhythm. The cons are that it might not lend itself as well to falling within natural syllabic emphasis. You just might have to do more adjusting to get it to lend itself to natural syllabic emphasis.
Step 1: write down words
Step 2: Choose durations for each word, starting at the beginning, one or two syllables at a time.
Step 3: Check as you go, and adjust as necessary.
Here's an example of the notating rhythm following the same process we used to notate the pitches.
A LITTLE MORE ADVANCED, lends to more options
This is notation derived from speech, using beat maps. The pros of this method are that it allows for more authentic rhythms, and its approachable and a great way for students to learn to derive or dictate rhythms. The challenge to this method is that the student has to have a little more knowledge to be successful (and the teacher), but this is good in that it gets at a deeper level of thinking.
Step 3: Place dots within each beat to represent the number of sounds in each beat
Step 4: check. How many beats? How many sounds? Does it match up?
Step 5: Turn your dots into notes by adding stems
SUSANS FABULOUS RHYTHM
I was determined to get this rhythm! I was really overthinking it at the training, and I want you all to know it was doable!
Because we weren't sure of the time signature, or even the smallest unit of beat, we needed to first determine the smallest unit of beat and work from there.
Here's a video of me going through the process.
Step one: draw dots for the smallest unit of sound in your rhythm.
Step 2: connect the dots that share a word within your rhythm, (This is how you know how short or long each note will be in relation to the other notes.)
Step 3: Add stems. Write in the words, then tie the notes that are more than one sound.
Step 4: Translate ties into single notes.
You could be done here, if you want. This is enough to have a written record and recreate the rhythm later on.
Step 5: figure out your strong beats and time signature. I actually came up with a few solutions for this rhythm.
Here, I just divided the rhythms above in half. I felt like this fit better becuase it was such a fast rhythm.
Figure out where your strong beats are, and how you want to group your notes into measures.
I like 6/8 time best for this rhythm. It feels the most natural.
Step 6: Check your work.
Point to your rhythm. Speak and tap it. Adjust as needed.
I wanted to be more than double sure I figured this out correctly, so I put the rhythm into my notation program and had it play back for me.
Here are all the rhythms I considered put into my notation program. They all played back exactly the same, but the 6/8 time signature makes the most sense to me.
The first rhythm below is how I started at the training, but I got confused when the feel switched from duple (sounds grouped into 2) to triple (sounds grouped into 3) meter. I feel like the last two choices below indicate the difference in feel between triple and duple the best, and the last is less complicated (in my opinion) because it stays in one time signature.
composing melody
Below is video from the training of the process for adding pitches to a rhythm. I should have pulled out an instrument from the beginning, to show you how that could be done. If you're not comfortable singing the pitches like we did in the training, just use a barred instrument and play the pitches, or boomwhackers, then sing what you play.
Using barred instruments (or boomwhackers) lends itself really well to letting the students compose melodies in small groups or on their own. Just let them use instruments with only the notes you want them to use.
If you don't have barred instruments already, or if you are on a cart and want something more portable, I love these resonator bells.
If you would like to leave feedback from the training, here's the link. http://goo.gl/forms/Oytuojt7On
Thank you!
I was at Farmington Elementary a while back, and Ann was doing drum circles with her students. She took a song from this post on the blog (thanks, Melanie!), and adapted it to work with her drum circle. Instead of Pass the Yoda, she changed the words to Pass the Drumstick.
I love learning from you teachers and watching you take ideas and make them your own.
Today I was working in a lower grade classroom. We had been doing lesson on drumming and movement, and the students had been entirely engaged, attentive, focused, and following directions. I wish I would have recorded it.
About halfway or more through the lesson, I started to say to the students, "when you hear the drum make a sound, make a big shape." (and I played the drum on the word sound). Before I could finish my sentence the students all started making noises. I was really confused. Where did that come from? It was so random. I looked at the teacher, and she was equally confused.
I gave the direction again, "When you hear the drum make a sound....." (again playing the drum on the word sound), and again the students cut me off with noise making.
I was really baffled. I thought for a moment, and I realized the students were following directions.The students had heard, "When you hear the drum, make a sound." And, they obeyed promptly, both times.
That scenario still has me laughing. It was so funny to me becuase it felt so random and caught me so off guard. It's also a great lesson. It is so important, as teachers, that we seek to understand the cause. Why aren't our students listening or following directions as we expected? Why aren't they succeding? We can't really fix the problem if we don't know the cause. Had I reacted with judgment instead of wonder, disciplined them, scolded them, etc., the outcome would have been so different. They would have listened and discontinued the behavior, but they also would have lost some trust in me. Our students need to feel safe in order to have the confidence to try new and scary things. They need to feel safe to guess, to try, to get the wrong answer, to explore, to fail, and ultimately to grow.
