Looking for engaging, musical games to play with your students? Here are a few of my favorite games and activities for elementary music classes, children's choirs, and elementary group classes.
Five fun and action-filled circle games to practice rhythm, pitch, and more with your elementary music students.
Class Openers for Elementary Music. Organized Chaos. Fun ways to establish a routine for the beginning of each elementary general music class as a warm-up and allow student leadership as well.
November 20, 2013 We have been learning all about "tempo" (the speed--fast or slow--of the beat) and "rhythm" in ...
Learn how to practice rhythms with this budget-friendly and fun rhythm game in your elementary music classroom.
Teaching elementary music? Learn all about classroom management strategies to control those fifth graders in the blog post!
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
Once in a while I do a blog post more aimed at a music teacher audience, and this is one of those posts. This is the hello song that I sing to start every music for kindergarten and first grade. …
It's recorder time!! My 4th grade classes have been playing for two weeks now. We have been working on fundamentals and playing with a pretty, soft sound. I've also been crazy about articulation. I don't know why but a "fwah" attack drives me insane! I am doing a couple things differently this year in order to reinforce all these great fundamental habits and really motivate the students. First, like recorder karate, we have 3 beginning belts: Black and Yellow striped, Pink and Sparkly. Black and Yellow: "B Belt" Hold a B with a soft, pretty sound for 20 counts with left hand on top and good posture. We practice a breathing exercise every time they come to music up to 24 counts. Pink: Tonguing Belt Tongue 4 notes in a row with a tah attack on each one Sparkly: First solo Play Hot Cross Buns for the class. I make my students leave their recorders in the classroom until they can play a song as a class. It is a great motivating tool and keeps them from going home and reinforcing bad habits. Here is a picture of my recorder with the belts attached. I use pipe cleaners and they work like magic. The kids can get them on easily and they stay on! For the B belt, I just twisted yellow and black together. My fifth grade class came up with pink for tonguing. Everyone has gotten a kick out of that. And of course, sparkly is the most exciting belt. Second, during class I am watching for students who are putting forth great effort and doing the fundamentals well. When I see or hear something great, I give the student a ticket. (Those carnival ride tickets...2000 on a roll for 4 bucks) They write their name on it and place it in the box. At the end of the six weeks, I will draw out x number of tickets and we are having an "Ice Cream Sundae Party." As a review of fundamentals and a ticket opportunity, I sat in front of the class and performed things wrong, like posture, left over right, breathing, tonguing, etc. I asked the class to figure out what I was doing wrong and when they knew, raise their hand. If the person I called on got it correct, they got a ticket. Every hand in the room was up!
music lessons for home schoolers, music lessons for the young child, peter and the wolf, rhythm, teaching musical form, melody, elementary music
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
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.
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!
Music class is an active, engaging, and joyful experience! This is especially true when our musical activities are grounded in creative and intentional teaching strategies. One of the most important teaching strategies has to do with teaching the difference between steady beat and the rhythm of
Fun and engaging hand clapping game to teach your kiddos!
This is a free printable for my body percussion card sets. This printable as well as the cards contain the basic four body percussion activities SNAP, PAT, CLAP, and STOMP. The cards can be used to introduce body percussion or as a visual reminder in students' folders. I like to print out various...
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.
October 12, 2013 Fourth and fifth grade students are reviewing "rhythm" (the short and long patterns of the beat) in music class...
Fruit Canon (Mango Mango Mango)
Try using rhythm games in your music classroom with these sets of rhythmic notation cards
I love when we have an Olympic year in music class. This is the second one we've celebrated since I began teaching, and we went all out! I started off by selecting 8 countries and then dividing each of my classes into 4 teams (I have 4 risers, so each riser was a team). Students in grades 4-6 participated, so there ended up being one grade level each on every team. Each day, students competed in a different Olympic event. The events we competed in were the ski jump, speed skating, curling, bobsled, biathlon, and ice hockey. Each event focused on a different musical concept such as rhythm, singing, note reading, rhythmic values, etc. Here are the posters I created for each one. We listened to the national anthem of the winning country after each event and kept track of each country's medals on the board in the back of the room. The students loved checking the board to see which country was in the lead. Here is the final medal count from the end of the month. Here are some pictures of the students competing in each event. We used paper plates for ice skates, actual curling brooms for curling, floor hockey sticks and tennis balls for hockey, and laminated tag board for cross-country skis. The difficulty of each event was modified based on the grade level. It was a great month! Speed Skating Speed Skating Curling Ice Hockey Instrument Family target for the biathlon Cross Country skiing to the target in the biatlon Biathlon Biathlon: matching the instrument to the correct target
Books for elementary music? You can teach musical concepts in elementary music with books! In this post we have 9 book based lessons for elementary music!
This set includes step by step guidance to help students compose using the following forms: ABA, ABACA, ABCBA in 3/4 meter or 4/4 meter. Choose the form and meter you want to focus on with your kids. There are three levels of composition templates to choose from. Use as much or as little as will work for you. 1. Rhythm composition: Directions are given for writing a "hamburger" composition in the selected form, using only rhythm. You can specify the rhythms you allow your students to use. (3/4 meter and 4/4 meter templates are included for each form). 2. Melodic composition: Directions are given to transfer rhythms from the rhythm templates to melodies using the rhythms (in C pentatonic). (3/4 and 4/4 meter templates are included for each form.) 3. Final Melodic/Rhythmic Templates: After the first two steps are done, students can create a final, polished composition on the staff. After completing their project, students can perform it on xylophones (if melody added) or on rhythm instruments (if rhythm is used in isolation). Worksheets are provided in color as well as in black and white. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Learn all the tips and tricks for playing the rhythm chairs game in the elementary music classroom.
November 20, 2013 We have been learning all about "tempo" (the speed--fast or slow--of the beat) and "rhythm" in ...
Looking for games and lessons to teach solfege? These solfa activities will keep your students engaged in learning about melody in music class
Tips from a former disillusioned music student on how to be a better music teacher. Your students and their parents will thank you!
Kids love balls and I use them to teach concepts, in team building, during rehearsals and more! Here's my ten ways to use balls in the music class room.
Echo songs are a fantastic choice for when you're trying to save your voice. By choosing a few echo song recordings, your students can sing to their heart's content without you destroying your voice in the process. Here are just five of some of my favorite echo songs for the elementary music classroom.
Class Openers for Elementary Music. Organized Chaos. Fun ways to establish a routine for the beginning of each elementary general music class as a warm-up and allow student leadership as well.
How to teach melody in elementary music class for first year elementary music teachers-- from high and low to solfege to notes on the staff.
Pass the Shoe is a fantastic song for practicing steady beat in the elementary music classroom. It's a short song with a catchy tune, making it easy for students to internalize. The accompanying game can be modified in multiple ways to fit nearly any age group and skill level.
Teaching elementary music? Learn all about classroom management strategies to control those fifth graders in the blog post!
Five fun and action-filled circle games to practice rhythm, pitch, and more with your elementary music students.
If you're looking for a fun music reading activity, look no further. Kaboom! Is an exciting rhythm or melody game for elementary music.
