January in music

____ Here's what happened in music recently (January):

• Kindergartners reviewed what they knew about small percussion instruments, using their sounds to enhance a book, "Worms Wiggle" and explore movement verbs matched with those instrument choices.  They were introduced to some new singing games:  Bow, Wow, Wow and Doggie Doggie Where's Your Bone?  We also did some mallet exploration in preparation for playing and being introduced to the tone bars.  Students so far have played xylphones, focusing on mallet hold and equating what is played to the movement vocabulary we have used - walking, running, jumping, hopping and sliding.

• First Graders - Fifth Graders all took part in our first ever all-school Sing-along Assembly Thursday, January 11th in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other difference makers.  They learned 5 songs for this.

• First and Second Graders then started focusing on performance etiquette and preparing songs and pieces to share with families and invited guests at their upcoming Specials Program:  Our Earth Matters.  The first graders will add instrument parts to a Traditional Native American piece called The Earth is Our Mother, and the second graders will add accompaniment parts on the Orff instruments (xylophones, glockenspiels and metallophones) for a piece by Colorado composer, Elizabeth Gilpatrick, called Care for the Earth.  These two pieces will weave together into one ABA musical whole.  There are three other pieces the students are working on to share at the program - all on an environmental theme.  For more information about the specials  program - check on the 1st and 2nd grade programs page in this blog.

• Third Graders have begun learning to play the recorder!  In this rotation they have learned some very important basics:  
• How to hold the recorder - with left hand on top
• How to blow the recorder with a gentle, warm airspeed like teasing a candle
• How to tongue - starting and stopping the sound with a gentle 'd' 
• Fingering and notation for two notes - B and A
  Once students have learned 3 songs with three notes (not two) then personally owned recorders will be coming home along with music to practice and instructions on logging home practice.

• Fourth Graders got back to working on pieces for their upcoming Colorado Connection Concert.  These will happen before spring break and parents will be notified of their child's performance date and time 3 weeks ahead.  In this rotation students were introduced to Square Dancing - which is the Colorado folk dance.  They learned the calls and moves for one long square dance, plus the few calls in The Symbol Song.  In addition, we started learning a new piece for recorder, Ride the Iron Horse which introduced us to two new notes - low d and high d.  We also got a start on a really cool piece called the Gold Rush Rap.  Some students volunteered to start learning the rap parts for this.

• Fifth Graders returned to focusing on melody in this rotation.  The reviewed treble clef notation and had a 2nd take on the 50 in 5 challenge (timed note naming challenge).  Several students bettered their scores and more students were placed in the Hall of Fame for various times.  Our big project was being introduced to a melody as we created a choreography for the phrases and then learned to play the simple melody (really just the melodic skeleton of a piece) on tonebars set up in a pentatonic scale.  Using some fancy technology to notate the changes as we made them, students made small changes to the melody to make it their own class composition - double or quadrupling notes to change the rhythm and adding passing tones.  We played the piece in unison and in a melodic canon - dividing both by range and by timbre.