I started back to school this past week with my kids on Tuesday. I had such a great first week and I am so excited to be back making music with them. We spent our first few days going over music room rules and procedures (click here to see rules post), emergency drills, and jumped right into making music. Can I just say that I LOVE pinterest! I found so many great ideas for back to school games through Pinterest as well as from Susan during Level 3. I thought I would share some of the really fun ones that the students enjoyed our first few days back: "Up The Ladder" is a great game for learning the names of your new students. "Down, Down Baby" is from the Amidons. SO FUN! Apparently this is a favorite, because it's being sung on the bus! Hickety Pickety Bumblebee is a fun one to use with K/1. In first grade you could review four voices with "can you sing (whisper, call, speak) your name to me". With kindergarten, it might be a bit intimidating to ask them to sing their name to you on day 1 of music, but let's be honest we are still learning all their names several weeks into the school year. Pull this out with them a little bit later (maybe after you have presented the four voices) and do this then. Mamalama: I learned this in Level 3, and we take it a bit faster than in this video, but it is SO FUN! I even had a student get the last part after just a few listenings. CRAZY! What are some of your favorite first day songs and activities? Still looking for ways to set up and decorate your room? This music room decor catalog will give you lots of idea, plus a back to school tip on each page!
Use our free printable music activity as a boredom buster with kids stuck at home or as a fun part of music education in a classroom.
Fifteen school themed ad lib worksheets great for homework assignments, extra credit, and language arts skills practice.
What are your top 5 best hits? Here's a fun way for any music lover to analyze their favorite songs.
Sometimes our plans go awry, and we just need a list of go-to ideas for unexpected sick days. So, here are my top two easy sub plans.
Create a sub plan so that you are good to go in the event of needing a substitute teacher as an art teacher or music teacher can make your life easier. There are many tips on putting together a sub plan and here are a few to get your started.
Most of us teach multiple grade levels. I teach 4 year olds through 94 year olds. I skip 12 year olds through somewhere in the 60's, though. I think that probably needs explaining, right? I teach Junior Kindergarten through fourth grade and also facilitate music and drum circles at an assisted living center every 2-3 months. The youngest were probably my most difficult age to plan for starting out as a brand new teacher and I continue searching for great material to add to my "collection". We all know how it is - in a singular 30 minute lesson with the younger kiddos we might go through 10-15 activities! Interestingly, my oldest sometimes seem the same! I seek materials from various sources; blogs, bools, fellow teachers, and websites. Several years ago I found a childrens music performer named Nancy Stewart. Each month she posts a Song of the Month! You can search by category, year/month, and alphabetically, and even better - all her songs are downloadable, some have visuals to download, and most have the sheet music to download - all for FREE! YES! There are songs for Eid, Christmas, St. Patirck's Day, Diwali, Valentines, seasonal songs and everything in between. Most of the music is original and I have found some really wonderful material! One of my favorites is the Rhythm Stick Song. Nancy so kindly gave me permission to share the song with you here - the mp3 is available on her site - click the link above. Hope you enjoy it - my kiddos do! We also make up additional verses - "With my sticks I run...", walk, hop, etc. My favorite rhythm sticks are the Basic Beat Combination Sticks pictured below. I love these - perfectly sized at 8" long, no splintering, and one is smooth and the other ridged. They are about $3.00 a pair, and an awesome investment! You can get them here from West Music. Have fun with these! Happy New Year!
Write for the NAfME Blog SEARCH & FILTER Search Category Subscribe to NAfME Notes Subscribe to NAfME Notes, our biweekly e-newsletter, to receive highlights from the blog and other NAfME news in your inbox. Subscribe Now Write for the NAfME Blog Interested in sharing your experience with the music education…
Excuse our noise... musicians at work! :) After reviewing rhythm patterns at the beginning of the year, 3rd grade classes began working on layering rhythm patterns together. This is one of the more di
It's summer time!! I haven't blogged in a while because I've been working on some really great resources. (And enjoying the fact that I am no longer a first year teacher!) I am almost done,but until then, here is a great first day of school/music class game. This is an icebreaker and I am planning to use it with my upper primary/middle school classes. Here is a link to the pdf of this worksheet. This is on Google Docs. Just open it and under file, click download! Enjoy!
High Shoals Elementary School Music Blog, Oconee County GA, Orff Music Instruction
Tomorrow is the big day! KIDDOS!!! HAHAHA!!! I don't tremble.. ok, maybe a little.. not out of fear, but excitement, for sure!! I have seen a few posts on facebook about teachers who are fearful, sad, and lacking in the excitement of the year and that frankly makes me sad. I truly hope it is because of the situation/school/environment and not because of the fact they are teaching children and nervous about that. After all, we are one of the few, the chosen, the incredibly blessed/lucky who are privileged enough to teach BOTH sides of the amazing brain; the creative and the analytical. How cool is that??!!! First day of school I use my Drums Rule/Drum Rules post (see below for previous post) with older kiddos. Younger ones I use a Welcome to the Music Room song a friend wrote years ago and the poem "Ickity Tickity Bumblebee, can you say your name for me" while patsching and clapping, then they say their name and do an action (grades 1-2) which everyone has to copy. It's hilarious, silly, but also informs me quickly whether the students have a good grasp of beat. I also use this one every now and again and put it into a new format for y'all. Have fun and welcome to another year!!
This free printable “I Spy” music-themed picture activity features guitars, harps, keyboards, drums, saxophones, and more. Have your child count each item and record the count below the picture…
Song Index
October 12, 2013 Fourth and fifth grade students are reviewing "rhythm" (the short and long patterns of the beat) in music class...
Song Index
The 6th graders have just finished up a unit project on Musical Styles. The goal of this project was to get the students to explore music outside of the country/pop/rock bubble that we tend to be in in our small town. I also wanted them to listen to music more closely to analyze things like the meaning of the lyrics, why & how music is used in different situations, and where they hear music. I gave the students 4 projects to choose from. The project was to be done mostly at home, but after starting the project, I realized that I could do the project in school next year using the classroom tablets each student has a putting music into a Dropbox (something new I'm just learning how to use). After starting the project, I realized there were a lot of things I wanted to change for next year or just make more specific. I have listed those things in red. Overall, I really enjoyed the project and for my first year trying it, I think it went pretty well. The projects options were: Soundtrack of My Life (lesson from TeachersPayTeachers-my document is a slightly modified version of the download): Students created a soundtrack of songs that had lyrics that related to their lives. They had to explore the meaning behind the lyrics and label what style of music each song was. After doing this project, I realized that it didn't really expose students to any new styles of music, so it didn't really fit the theme of my project. However, it was still fun to see their answers! Musical Interests Survey Students created a 10 question survey about musical styles and had to survey 10 people from at least 3 different age groups. When they were finished, they graphed their findings. Most students created very simple graphs on notebook paper (I realized we needed to have a discussion about using a ruler!) and had questions that were open ended so they were hard to graph. Next year, I'll tell them to make their questions multiple choice or keep their answers to one word so they are easier to graph. One of the most creative graphs I received! Music Journal For one week, students kept a journal of all of the music they heard each day. They were supposed to record music in stores, businesses, on commercials, or in classrooms. I encouraged them to record at least 3 per day (the problem with saying that was every single student turned in ONLY 3 examples for each day). At the end of the week, they had to write a one-page reflection on what they noticed. Some students were very observant, and noticed that the dynamics of the music being played differed by the size of the store. They also noticed that the style of music was generally selected to fit the overall likes of their desired customers (ex: a punk clothing store in the mall played loud, punk music. Not country or jazz!) Although a few good recordings were made, several of the students just recorded the music they heard on Pandora or the radio, not music they heard by chance. Something to make more specific next time! Explore 3 New Styles This was probably the best project for accomplishing my main goal: exposing students to new music. Each student had to pick 3 styles of music they don't normally listen to and then find 3 songs from those styles that they liked. They then researched the song and presented it to the class. This is where I used the Dropbox and had several different examples of music on there for them to listen to if they couldn't find new music on their own. The songs presented were very original and it was fun to hear what they had picked. The only change I would make to this project is teaching the kids how to better articulate "why" they liked a piece of music. Most of them could only come up with answers like, "it had a good beat" or "I liked the way he sang it". I realized I haven't really taught them the vocabulary words to explain what they wanted to say. As I said, overall I felt it was a fun project, it just needs a bit of tweaking before next year. I tried to create a rubric that met all 4 projects. Here is the one I used and I just made some modifications as I was grading. I will post a copy of the rubric so you get a general idea, but just know that it is not a perfect rubric and definitely needs some changes.
Fruit Canon (Mango Mango Mango)
So much popular music overly sexual and violent. I’m always really happy to hear a positive and appropriate song on the radio. One great song that’s popular right now is “Best Day…
As a review of rhythm notation, I always play BINGO with my kiddos! I made a SMARTboard presentation during my first year of teaching and print/laminated boards. Now that I'm older and wiser (and with iPads), I put the bingo boards in Dropbox instead and have the images saved to the iPads. Typically, we use a Whiteboard App to cross off symbols. After playing BINGO many times, I've noticed the Whiteboard App (FREE) I was using had too many ads and tons of pop ups that distracted my kids. Today, we used the newly updated EduCreations instead and it worked much more smoothly! Here is a link to my TPT store where you can get Music BINGO for your classroom! **NO SMARTBOARD REQUIRED!** This file requires SMART Notebook, SMART Express, or SMART Notebook Interactive Viewer. SMART Express is a free online program and SMART Notebook Interactive Viewer is a free download. Check out the SMART website for more information. http://smarttech.com/Support/Browse+Support/Download+Software
Folk song based on pentatonic scale with lesson plan ideas for elementary music
“I can do this. I can do this! I’ve only got one more week…. ONE MORE WEEK!” Does that mantra sound familiar? I know that many of you are also psyching yourself up for one more week of high-energy kids who are sugared up from holiday parties and are […]
I used to dread making custom dice for my classroom, unless you are lucky enough to have wooden cubes to paste pictures onto, one step on a cardboard template dice from a student and th…
Looking for fun ideas to practice rhythm in the music room? Are you tired of the same ol', same ol'? Below are four ideas from four of our bloggers! From Linda: I don’t know about you but I love creating form using word chains! I especially love using manipulatives that the students can rearrange to create their own composition. So go ahead and grab that stack of beanie babies you use for tone matching and steady beat activities and Let’s Make Music! Set out 4 beanie babies in a row and have the students echo you. Each beanie baby will receive 2 beats. Rearrange the 4 and have the students echo you again. Continue the process substituting different beanies and changing the order. Eventually, start speaking the A section “Let’s Make Music” while you are arranging four beanie babies. Once you are finished speaking the A section the class should be ready to speak and clap the new beanie baby arrangement. Continue the process – rearranging the beanie babies during the A section. Repeat the lesson on a different day but add non-pitched percussion instruments in place of clapping the beanie baby arrangement. It would be fun to have the students sit in a circle during this lesson and to pass the instrument to the person on their right while speaking the A section. When they are finished speaking the A section they will have a new instrument to play for the B section! Have them continue to speak the beanie baby arrangement first and then play the rhythm of the words on their new instrument. Continue the process. Extend the lesson one more day by dividing your class into groups of 3 or 4. Each group should create their own beanie baby composition to speak and play. It will be an eight beat composition with each beanie baby receiving 2 beats. Perform ABABA. Everyone speaks A and a different group performs their composition for one of the B sections. If you would like a copy of the lesson plan and music for your files click here! http://bit.ly/LetsMakeMusic Enjoy making music and I’d love to hear how you used the lesson with your students! From Elaine: When it comes to working on rhythm-reading in music class, I believe in repetition. Yes, friends, you heard it here first: repetition is key. And there’s nothing wrong with doing the same thing over and over as long as it works. For a long time, I struggled with making rhythm activities more fun. Let’s face it, reading rhythm patterns can be a little boring. So when I’m working with the kiddos reading rhythmic patterns, I like to add a simple backing track. I like to call this “Rhythm Jams”. Here’s how it goes: because this is a sight-reading game, I display several rhythms on my board and randomly choose one at a time. I usually point to the pattern using my fancy finger-pointer. While the beat track is playing, I count the group off for each of the rhythm patterns. Sometimes, I go back to one we’ve already performed just to see if students are more accurate the second time. After we finish the displayed rhythms, I switch the track and the rhythms. This way the kids can try different rhythms in different tempos. Switching things up frequently adds to the excitement and the amount of time you’re able to continue the repetitive activity. By the end of your Rhythm Jams session, your students will be up out of their seat shaking what their Momma’s gave ‘em. Trust me. Can’t find a rhythm track to use? Try THIS website. It’s a huge compilation of YouTube videos featuring a wide variety of groovy rhythm tracks. From David: One of my favorite things to do when working with rhythm is to teach kids to look for rhythm in everyday words and phrases. You can start introducing this concept on the very first day of class while you’re learning kids' names by saying their name and then clapping the rhythm. Da-vid becomes ta ta. Mel-a-nie becomes ti-ti ta. Kim is ta rest. Mag-da-le-na is ti-ti ti-ti and so on. As soon as you get kids to start thinking that all words have rhythm you have the ability to make anything a game and make any word part of a song. I’m trained in Orff Schulwerk and in my levels classes we learned about the work of one of Orff’s most influential students, Gunild Keetman. Keetman was originally Orff’s student but quickly became his contemporary as she and Orff worked together to create what we now know as Orff Schulwerk. Keetman had a huge role in the theory behind everything that we learn and do from rhythm to movement, recorder, and more. One of the things that that I love the most from Keetman is her focus on “Rhythmic Building Bricks.” She says that the building bricks are the smallest rhythmic units that we use when we build our songs and rhymes. There are five building bricks that Keetman referred to over and over again for 2/4 and 4/4 time. Once kids learn to break down phrases with these building bricks they can decode and figure out the rhythms for anything. I usually start with words that kids already know and ask them to think about how many sounds/syllables a word has. I’ll give them a word like “backpack” (two sounds) and ask them to figure out the building brick that goes with it (ta ta). Then we might try out school (one sound) and figure out that it works with the brick ta rest. The most difficult part of all of this is when kids have to decide whether a three sound word is ta ti-ti or ti-ti ta. I try and give them simple words to figure out like “puppy dog” where the sounds are easily separated. There are a million ways you can teach and reinforce this idea that a word has rhythm. I have several sorting games for rhythm centers and interactive SMART board activities that I use to help kids start to categorize words by their rhythm. Eventually I give students other words or a word bank full of words to categorize and sort out. From there you can do a number of things. Teach kids a nursery rhyme or song and then have them work in small groups or pairs to break it down into its rhythmic building bricks. Here’s an example using the nursery rhyme “Rain, Rain, Go Away.” Try an example with the whole class to explain the process and then break them into small groups and give each one a different nursery rhyme to work on. Once the students have figured out their rhythm have them speak the poem and then speak the rhythm. Then have them clap the rhythm or play the rhythm on rhythm sticks. After 3 or 4 minutes, have the groups switch so that students can do the same activity with a different poem. Looking for good nursery rhymes to use in class? I have a free list of them on my blog. Check out the link here: http://www.makemomentsmatter.org/rhymes.html This last fall I took this idea of rhythm building bricks and turned it into a center game. I had little cards with different words and their corresponding rhythms. Students sorted out all the words (about 30 of them total) into five different piles – one for each of the building brick rhythms. Then they arranged them into patterns and wrote down the patterns they created. Every kid walked away from class with a rhythm that they composed using the different rhythmic words. This meant that they gained experience arranging rhythms into different measures and phrases (a composition activity) and they reinforced the idea that each word has its own specific rhythm. Here’s a picture of my kiddos in action. From Tracy: I have found that rhythm skills can be tricky to differentiate in my classroom. Usually we work on rhythms as a whole group or in sections. I plan centers that allow me to work with small groups but struggled for many years to find a way to challenge my gifted students and provide rhythmic remediation for others. Here are a couple of my favorite websites and apps for differentiating rhythm skill work. Music Tech Teacher has several activities and quizzes that address rhythm skills. I use Rhythm Billionaire with 5th graders and Listening to Rhythms with 3rd graders. I think you’ll find several activities there that your students will enjoy. http://musictechteacher.com/music_quizzes/music_quizzes.htm Rhythm Trainer is great for targeting specific notes and note combinations. It can work well with 1st grade through high school. Choose the notes you want to use and then start. Students hear a rhythm and then click the notes given to recreate the rhythm. http://www.therhythmtrainer.com/ Rhythm Cat is an app that works best on an iPad. It starts with very simple rhythms. You tap the iPad to play the rhythm and it gauges if you have played it correctly. Complete the rhythm with only a slight mistake or two and you progress to the next level. Each level comes with an explanation of the duration of the new notes and most levels have a rhythm track and guiding melody. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/rhythm-cat-learn-to-read-music/id488167475?mt=8 Rhythm Repeat is another app that I really enjoy. I use it to challenge my gifted musicians. It is a little like the electronic Simon games in the way you play. You will hear a melody and have to tap it back in rhythm using 3 different colored dots. The difficulty increases quickly and will prove to be an exciting challenge to your students who need it. Difficulty can be set and uses more dots (pitches), increased tempo and more complex patterns. FUN! https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/rhythm-repeat/id455680974?mt=8 Hope you and your students enjoy these rhythm activities! Sing, Teach, Love!
One of my favorite children's books is the classic, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, by Judith Viorst. Artie Almeida has a wonderful lesson plan in her book, Mallet Madness, that serves as a great review activity for the beginning of the year! Not only does it review basic rhythms but you can also use it for an instrument technique refresher as well. Our HSES 2nd graders have really enjoyed this activity as we have gotten back into the swing of things in music class. First we read the story together... Next, we reviewed the quarter note, eighth notes, and quarter rest, and then I had the students discover the rhythm of the repeated phrase in the book, "...terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day." I divided the students into 4 groups and each group practiced one part of the phrase. Then each group played their rhythm on their instruments and we put the phrase all together. The woodblocks: The tambourines: The maracas: The drums: Then I read the book again, and each group played the rhythm on their instrument on the correct words. Great job, 2nd graders!
Welcome to 31 Days of Homemade Music! Today we will be continuing to make a case for why anyone can benefit from studying music. To find other posts in this series, click here. Ever wondered if music is just as effective a brain developer as, say, math or science? If you remember my post from […]
Song Index
The Yellow Brick Road Blog is a website dedicated to providing music teachers with fun education resources for serious music literacy.
Clever echo is an instant dictation exercise in music learning. Check out this blog post for a bunch of ready-made examples you can use now!
2, 4, 6, 8: A chant for music class. Blog post includes notation, ostinati, extension activities, and more for your elementary music lessons!
Mama Lisa's World presents thousands of traditional kids songs from over a hundred countries and cultures! We also feature a major collection of Mother Goose Rhymes, global recipes, holiday traditions and lively conversations about childhood around the world.
Today I'm giving a glance into my first day of school lesson plans, from TK - 5th grade. In the first day of music class, students are arguably the most attentive they will be all year. This puts a unique pressure on the first day's lesson plan to set the tone for the rest of our time together.
Song Index
SUBSCRIBE TO THE FREE RESOURCE LIBRARY Click here MUSIC EDUCATION RESOURCES IN THE SHOP SHOP Music Resources Add to cart $5.25Rated 0 out of 5 Vocal Explorations : Fall Themed, Animated, Worksheets K-3″ Add to cart $4.50Rated 0 out of 5 Upper Elementary Music Class Chant,Game and Rhythm Lesson: “Get to Know Ya” L2 Stock […]
Sarasponda
Write for the NAfME Blog SEARCH & FILTER Search Category Subscribe to NAfME Notes Subscribe to NAfME Notes, our biweekly e-newsletter, to receive highlights from the blog and other NAfME news in your inbox. Subscribe Now Write for the NAfME Blog Interested in sharing your experience with the music education…
Four White Horses
