Teach your students all about Danse Macabre by Camille Saint-Saens with a variety of fun lessons. Dance Macabre is the ...
Today, I'd like to share with you one of my favorite Halloween activities to do with my older students: lights-off listening! Many of the activities I do during the weeks prior to Halloween tend to be geared toward younger students. I've struggled to find something that appeals to my older kids. Then, I came across this great product from Music with Sara Bibee: This guided listening unit is great for older students because it has information for a variety of spooky pieces, as well as videos and assessment worksheets. I immediately gravitated to the rating worksheets she provided. Students listen to certain pieces and give them a rating from 1-10 on how spooky they think the music is. You can also insert your own selections as the files are editable. I chose 9 of the pieces (and added a bonus one where they had to guess the title - it was "Jaws") for my students. I tried to include a variety so some were new, while others were recognizable for them. I felt bad about printing a page for every student when all they were doing is circling a number for their rating, so I used page protectors. This was awesome! I printed 25 pages in color and then slipped each one into a page protector. Every student was given a whiteboard marker and a small eraser (I have a set we use for rhythm writing) and spread them out around the room. They were able to circle their rating and erase it when we were all finished - no wasting of paper! Plus, I can use these for many years now! Hooray! Now, here's where the fun part comes in! My students struggle with listening at times because they want to wiggle, move, talk, etc. Attention spans are getting shorter and shorter with kids every day. I knew I could hook them by creating a spooky (not scary) environment as we listened to each piece. It would also be a fun and unique memory for them. So, I stumbled upon this fun Halloween rotating light on Amazon. It was only $10 and looked really fun! After all the students had their materials, I shut off the lights in my room and put this in the middle. It glowed and created some cool lighting on the ceiling as we listened to our music. Not only was it a spooky feature for our Halloween listening, but it was calming for several of my students that need to come down at the end of the day on a Friday afternoon. After we listened to all of the pieces, we came back together and talked briefly about things like composers, history, instruments, etc. I loved hearing the kids talk about music! They loved sharing their ideas with each other and comparing scores. It was a great introduction to listening and talking about different kinds of music. Clean up only took a minute because each student wiped down their sheet with their eraser and put away the markers - EASY! I love this activity and so did the kids. It gave them a chance to celebrate Halloween music in a way that was more "mature" for them. Yes, they love playing Halloween music games but this got them thinking and interacting in a unique way. Turning the lights off helped them focus but also created a spooky way to listen. I know this experience will stay with most of them and that makes my heart happy! Have you tried a unique listening experience before? I'd love to hear more ideas! Feel free to share below!
Group composition: film scoring Recently one of the members of the Midnight Music Community (MMC) – teacher Brigitte Louise Lessard […]
Origami fortune tellers can be a fun, simple activity to review concepts in music lessons. Here is how to use origami fortune tellers in music lessons.
I have posted about this before, but I REALLY love the Pass the Pumpkin song/activity. This year, I came up with a new powerpoint for my first graders and I used it just this morning and am really happy with how well the students sang and played. One thing I love about this song is that it is "safe" for schools that do not celebrate Halloween; there is the word "spooky" but that is, technically, NOT a Halloween word. I hope you enjoy the slides below.. save each one and put into a ppt. or email me at [email protected] and I'll send you the pdf! The directions and song are on slide 2, slide 3 is a beat slide and then subsequent slides show the progression from iconic rhythms to actual notation. The final slides show what instruments play on the various parts of the song. Happy Fall!
Ha, sorry! I learned this song in elementary school to the tune of "Danse Macabre" and it's stuck with me ever since. Here's the video from YouTube that I like to use. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3Eg8UifzmI Anyways, I thought I'd share some Halloween activities my classes have been doing. In the Hall of the Mountain King - Grieg This is the first year I've really delved into Grieg. I love the music and the melody really sticks in the kids' heads! I start introducing it in Kindergarten and 1st grade with Eric Litwin's (Pete the Cat!!!) song from The Learning Groove. It takes the melody and puts in words like "I can shake my shaker egg and sneak around the room." It's fun to add egg shakers and a little movement once the students have learned the melody. As they get older, I show my intermediate students a short cartoon of the story. It's only about 5 minutes, but also adds in the "Morning Mood" music, which many of the students recognize. In the future, I'd like to add a literature connection. I've seen some great picture books online, but haven't picked one up yet. Soon! I also add rhythm sticks to the main theme, with the help of Malinda Phillips' great active listening resource! Check it out - it's free :) From there, we move on to actually feeling the beat, tempo and dynamic changes in the music. If you follow my blog, you know I LOVE Artie Almeida. She has a wonderful guiro and kickball lesson for this piece. I tried it with my third graders last week and we had so much fun! I used basketballs because we don't have enough kickballs and it still worked out just fine. Here are some pictures from my students engaging in the music: It was Character Counts week, so they're all dressed up in the careers they'd like to have.The basketball coach had to come get the balls for practice at the end of the day, but we had a good time while it lasted. Artie's lessons are truly wonderful resources. I encourage you to check out her videos on YouTube and purchase this resource. You won't regret it! Some other activities we are doing this week are: singing the story "There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Bat!" with melody from Kristin Lukow Halloween melody patterns from Aileen Miracle's 13 Nights freebie Halloween vocal explorations and "create your own" template from Amy Abbott Witch Witch (so-mi activity) and game from The Yellow Brick Road Spooky Music listening & rating from Music with Sara Bibee (this one is a fun activity for the older kids!) The last game we are playing is a favorite of my primary students! I discovered it on Pinterest last year and the students just love it. I can't seem to find the right recording for it, though. There is a faster version and a Denise Gagne version that has a different melody. I kind of plunked it out on my own and adapt it to my student's singing ability. Here's the video of the song I use and the game: It's really fun and a great way to reinforce steady beat. What Halloween or seasonal activities are you doing this week with your students?
Halloween sheet music for your early piano students about zombies... This one is energetic, a bit silly, and LOTS OF FUN!
Dynamic Scary Story with Explain Everything What better way to demonstrate understanding of musical dynamics than to use them to tell a scary story on Expla ...
This is a chant that I used in my student teaching and I use it EVERY year with great success. My first graders are in full-fledged ta ti-ti practice and I like that this uses four different combinations of those rhythmic elements for each line. Here's the chant: I use this mainly as a reading/decoding exercise with my first graders. There are endless extension activities that you can do with this from adding instruments, vocal exploration warm-ups, part work using body percussion with beat vs. rhythm, etc.. In fact, Liza Meyers blogged about it a couple years ago and has a fabulous post where you can read some of her ideas by clicking here. Now, back to the decoding activity that I do. My students read the the chant from a poster that I made "back in the day" (you know, before these new fangled contraptions called LCD-Projectors, SMART boards and document cameras, lol!). Here it is: It's not high-tech but it gets the job done and the kids like the silly pictures. After they know the chant (not in the same lesson that they learn the chant), I have them listen for a specific rhythmic pattern. For example, I'll ask them if they hear the pattern ti-ti ta ti-ti ta. They decode that it's the ghost line. Then they read the chant, substituting the rhythm syllables for the decoded line WHILE listening for another rhythm pattern. This continues until they have aurally decoded the entire chant and perform the chant on rhythm syllables only. On another day, we will do a notational decoding. I have the rhythm patterns from the song (see below) printed out and cut into strips of paper so that there is only one phrase per strip of paper. Working in alone or in pairs (depending on your stage of practice or students' level of reading ability), they receive and envelope that contains all four rhythmic patterns. They then put the rhythm patterns in order to match the song. A fun extension activity is to have them arrange the strips however they like and perform them in that order. If you have students who need and extra challenge (you know, those kiddos that have been in piano a couple years or really pick up on things quickly) you can have them perform their rhythmic pattern while the rest of the group performs the "Miss White" chant. The other beautiful thing about this chant is that if you teach in a school that doesn't celebrate Halloween you can get away using it. It does use a ghost but it's pretty safe to use. :)
Peer Gynt
Today, I'd like to share with you one of my favorite Halloween activities to do with my older students: lights-off listening! Many of the activities I do during the weeks prior to Halloween tend to be geared toward younger students. I've struggled to find something that appeals to my older kids. Then, I came across this great product from Music with Sara Bibee: This guided listening unit is great for older students because it has information for a variety of spooky pieces, as well as videos and assessment worksheets. I immediately gravitated to the rating worksheets she provided. Students listen to certain pieces and give them a rating from 1-10 on how spooky they think the music is. You can also insert your own selections as the files are editable. I chose 9 of the pieces (and added a bonus one where they had to guess the title - it was "Jaws") for my students. I tried to include a variety so some were new, while others were recognizable for them. I felt bad about printing a page for every student when all they were doing is circling a number for their rating, so I used page protectors. This was awesome! I printed 25 pages in color and then slipped each one into a page protector. Every student was given a whiteboard marker and a small eraser (I have a set we use for rhythm writing) and spread them out around the room. They were able to circle their rating and erase it when we were all finished - no wasting of paper! Plus, I can use these for many years now! Hooray! Now, here's where the fun part comes in! My students struggle with listening at times because they want to wiggle, move, talk, etc. Attention spans are getting shorter and shorter with kids every day. I knew I could hook them by creating a spooky (not scary) environment as we listened to each piece. It would also be a fun and unique memory for them. So, I stumbled upon this fun Halloween rotating light on Amazon. It was only $10 and looked really fun! After all the students had their materials, I shut off the lights in my room and put this in the middle. It glowed and created some cool lighting on the ceiling as we listened to our music. Not only was it a spooky feature for our Halloween listening, but it was calming for several of my students that need to come down at the end of the day on a Friday afternoon. After we listened to all of the pieces, we came back together and talked briefly about things like composers, history, instruments, etc. I loved hearing the kids talk about music! They loved sharing their ideas with each other and comparing scores. It was a great introduction to listening and talking about different kinds of music. Clean up only took a minute because each student wiped down their sheet with their eraser and put away the markers - EASY! I love this activity and so did the kids. It gave them a chance to celebrate Halloween music in a way that was more "mature" for them. Yes, they love playing Halloween music games but this got them thinking and interacting in a unique way. Turning the lights off helped them focus but also created a spooky way to listen. I know this experience will stay with most of them and that makes my heart happy! Have you tried a unique listening experience before? I'd love to hear more ideas! Feel free to share below!
Simple Halloween high low activity for teaching pitch to preschool and kindergarten music students using household items.
Happy Thanksgiving week everyone! I know a lot of you are still in school so here's a fun song to use with your 1st graders . .. . and 2nd graders! I found it in Holidays and Special Days by Grace Nash and Janice Rapley during my college practicum classes and have used it every year. The kids eat it up! Here's the song: Now, this is NOT a folk song. But over the years I've accidentally changed the melody. Here's the way I sing it with my kiddos (and we sing it with swung eighth notes): I use this to aurally identify/reinforce quarter rests with my 1st graders. Other than that, we use it for expression and FUN. Here's the game: Formation: circle, with one student (the "farmer") on the outside of the circle and 2-3 turkeys in the middle. Action: as the song is sung, the farmer walks around the outside of the circle while the turkeys trot around the middle of the circle. At the end of the song the farmer chases the turkeys. Depending on where your students are in your movement sequence, you can have the students in the circle walk the beat while the song is sung with their arms acting as a fence. At the end, the students can choose to make their joined arms gates or leave their section of the fence closed. You can also add instruments. In Holidays and Special Days there are more elaborate Orff parts. I simplified it so my 1st and 2nd graders can play is successfully and independently. Here are a couple of my 1st graders playing it this year. It's a lot of fun and it's great to get some of those pre-holiday wiggles out: Liza Meyer's wrote a post that included this song a couple years ago. She notates it as la,-do at the beginning but my source uses so-mi. You can read her post by clicking here. This post also has a fun Thanksgiving song to the tune of Zum Gali Gali- it's a must do! Your older kiddos with LOVE it! Have a GREAT week everyone!
Have You Seen the Ghost of John, now in the key of Em for beginning violin & fiddle players. Despite its strange lyrics, this is among the most beautiful short singing rounds in the world.
The Yellow Brick Road Blog is a website dedicated to providing music teachers with fun education resources for serious music literacy.
Miss White had a fright In the middle of the night Saw a ghost eating toast Halfway up the lamp post! Here's a fun arrangement to use with your young students, just in time for Halloween!
This is a fun file that I've been working on and finally posted. My Sugar Rush Rhythm files are pretty much the same, but with a candy theme instead. This is the image for Bundle #1, but they are sold individually or in one of three bundles. Each concept file contains multiple flashcards that I'll walk you through as well as 10 activities for using them for reading. First, there are large Flashcards. You can use this with a multitude of flashcard games: Sing What You Don't See, Poison, etc. Something fun to do with flashcards, be it rhythm or melodic, is extract the element that you're working on, have one half of the class sing or clap the element and the other class sing or clap the rest. So, in the card below, if la is the new element, the boys would only sing the la's and the girls would sing "everything else." And then of course switch. This can also be transferred to rhythm flashcards. Just another way to use flashcards. There are small flashcards, both numbered and un-numbered. These are great for centers or small group games. Also included in the file are staves on which students can use manipulatives to transcribe the stick notation onto. There are a few different games with which you can use these: There are landscape flashcards that are great for all those flashcard games too!: Here's an extension idea. I found this puppet this year (those of you that read my blog know that I LOVE puppets): Basically, you can build your own Monster Puppet, as all the parts come off. I use this as an incentive to performing a flashcard by themselves. If they do, the can add a part to the puppet. They EAT it up! Here are the team cards for the Monster Melody Madness Relay game. Basically, it's a glorified team game of Post Office. The students are in 2-6 teams. The teams are lined up, like a relay team, on one end of the room with the cards spread out on the other side of the room. The teacher either sings or plays a melody, the first person races to find that card. To make it more competitive, you can add time limits to find the cards or only the first team to find the card wins that round. Here are some sample monster cards: There are also small landscape cards, that can be used like the other small flashcards. These fit nicely into an envelope to play Post Office: They also fit well in these: I found a bunch of these at Walmart this year before school started but you can also buy them at Zipit. You can use these with beat passing games: instead of getting "out," a student reads a card instead. For instance, you can easily turn "Pick-a-Pumpkin" into a hand passing game or a beat passing game, using a small pumpkin. Here are the links to the files: so-mi la do Bundle #1: so-mi, la, do re low la low so Bundle #2: re, low la, low so high do fa ti Bundle #3: high do, fa, ti This I just finished this evening and will be added to my store tomorrow. I made some disappearing song files and keep meaning to make more. This one is a Halloween themed one, to use with the song "Pumpkin, Pumpkin." It practices the song on text: The rhythm: The solfége: Then they read it again, teachers choice. Since it's a "Monster Stole My Melody" file, I personally would have them read the solfége: And then the beats are removed, one by one, as an animated monster comes across the screen and "eats the song." This continues until the entire song is gone and they're reading the song from memory. I'll upload the link as soon as it's posted on TpT I hope you saw my post that my email was hacked. I can access it again and it's up and working. Remember, now through the 31st for every $25 you spend at my TpT Store I'll email you $5 of product. PLEASE do NOT put the free product in your cart as you will be charged. You can email me at my school or home account. . . or for good measure, send it to both, lol! This was thoroughly a Monday, I'm ready for a new day tomorrow! :)
I'm a huge fan of the Target dollar section and their seasonal stuff. Over the past three years, I've collected some great manipulatives that I love to use. I've already checked them out this year and I found the plastic pumpkins, plastic leaves, pumpkin erasers, and ghost erasers that you'll see below. I hope you find some great ideas: Here's a cute little anchor chart the students can make (I've done these with 5th grade in the past, but that was when I had 45 minutes per class). The leaves are die-cuts made from construction paper. Another fun activity (the small ghost erasers I found last year but the larger ones are currently at Target) is Mrs. White. I use this with K and 1 grades. It goes along with the poem: Mrs. White had a fright In the middle of the night Saw a ghost eating toast Halfway up the lamp post Sorry - for some reason it wont go vertical - stretch your neck ;) Introduction: We speak the poem and dramatize the words. For Kinder - Beat vs. Rhythm Lesson 1. We count the beats (number of squares - 16 beats) 2. We point to the beats as we say the poem 3. We say, "short-short" on the two ghosts and "long" on the one ghost - that's the rhythm 4. We clap the rhythm (two claps for two ghosts, one clap for one ghost) first without the poem, then with the poem 5. The students add the large ghost erasers to the single ghost and the small ghost erasers to the paired ghosts. For First - Quarter Note (ta) and Eighth Note Pair (titi) Lesson 1. We count the beats (number of squares - 16 beats) 2. We point to the beats as we say the poem. 3. We say "short-short" on the two ghosts and "long" on the one ghost - that's the rhythm 4. We clap the rhythm (two claps for two ghosts, one clap for one ghost) first without the poem, then with the poem 5. We add rhythm sticks to the rhythm as we say the poem and follow the ghosts 6. I laminate the worksheet and give the students a dry erase marker - at the bottom, next to the picture of the one ghost, we draw a quarter note (ta - one sound on one beat) and next to the picture of the two ghosts, we draw an 8th note pair (titi - two sounds on one beat) 7. Using this key, the students draw the correct rhythm over each ghost picture - then we check our answers This year, I found these acorns and leaves at Hobby Lobby ($3 a bag) and the pumpkins and more leaves at Target ($1 a box). You can find my instructions for this activity here: Fall Rhythm Fun The pumpkins are eighth note pairs (pumpkin) and the leaves are quarter notes (leaf). This year when I incorporate my Leaves lesson, I'll have the students dictate the rhythm themselves. Here's an example The plastic figures match the rhythm icons I use in the song. This year, I'm going to try to use these ice-cube trays. First, the students can create rhythm patterns. Then, they can use the top row as "so" and the bottom as "mi". My 2nd graders are reviewing rhythmic structures. Their's will be a little more complex (I use the folders like this all the time, sometimes with cards, sometimes with manipulatives, etc): This rhythm activity I used with the upper grades last year as a review. The students like to dictate patterns I sing or play, create their own patterns for the class to dictate, and play rhythms I have and create patterns to play. (You can find more about this here: Halloween Rhythm Dictations). I used this activity with the song, "Pick a Pumpkin". The students decode the first two measures using their erasers (jack-o-lantern, black cat, black cat, skull). You can find Mrs. White and the Fall rhythm fun printable here: Fall into Music
A very simple little finger rhyme for babies and toddlers about caring for a little spider. Great for lots of giggles and tickles!
double-sided tone ladders for Apple Tree and Little Leaves The second graders are currently in the land of "do." We've sung and played games, body signed, showed the "low" note by bending or ducking as we sang, echoed patterns while using individual tone ladders, and written do melodies with leaf note heads. staff boards and leaf notes for melodic writing This week I'll present do and the do clef and we'll focus on identifying, reading and writing do songs on the staff. do Songs Apple Tree Little Leaves Mouse Mousie Pumpkin Man (only the first two measures) One, Two, Three (Johnny Caught a Flea) One of the practice activities I'll be incorporating is my Apple and Pumpkin Melody Match I found foam apples (the come in packages mixed green and red and can be found in the dollar bin,) and foam pumpkins. (I really need to own stock in Target stores. They receive a lot of my cash.) On each apple I wrote the solfa of a do melodic pattern. On the pumpkins I wrote the same melody on the staff with a do clef: I stripped away the rhythm of these patterns because I want students to focus on the melody. (Have you ever noticed when showing mystery songs many kids will figure it out by matching the words and the rhythm and neglect the melody entirely? No? Just me? ...ok...) Each student will start the game with a pumpkin or an apple. They must find their partner and then write out their melody jointly on a staff board. I have pumpkin, ghost, leaves, and blackcat noteheads, (thank you, Amy!) once the pair have found each other they can choose which noteheads they use to write their pattern. Here are some of the do patterns I've used and what song and phrase they are from: Do you have additional do songs/activities? Please let me know. Have a lovely autumn week!
Teach your students all about Danse Macabre by Camille Saint-Saens with a variety of fun lessons. Dance Macabre is the ...
I am so sorry for the lack of updates recently. Lots of other things have been taking my time, and new posts got put on the back burner for awhile. This is a fun rhythm activi…
I'm a Mean Old Witch With a HAT! Halloween! (Both songs) There's No Such Thing as a Witch This week we have a primary act...
I have posted about this before, but I REALLY love the Pass the Pumpkin song/activity. This year, I came up with a new powerpoint for my fi...
I've come across some wonderful music forautumn and Halloween that are just intime for some fall crafting.The first 2 are from a 1908 school songbook called, 'American School Songs'.The next 2 songs were from a children's songbook called,'The Music Hour'.I hope you enjoy these as much as I do andfind wonderful projects to use them on.Blessings,Angie
