Musical Learning in January!

Building a house with instruments!  One class chose:
a maraca for the paint brush, a drum for the hammer,
and a guiro for the saw.

Kindergarten students began each class exploring expressive movement, finding ways to show what music looks like on our bodies.  We start with one finger, then two, then hands and arms and elbows and tummies.  Once we add hips and legs, things get really interesting!  But how do we decide which moves to choose?  Perhaps a peaceful song might have smooth moves, while an exciting song might have some bouncing!  After celebrating our individual responses to music, we worked as a team to build a house.  After singing our building song, students choose percussion instruments to represent the sound of the tools we used, and then played the steady beat while speaking our building poem.  Students were very proud of both their music and their structure! 

After exploring high and low sounds with our bodies, voices and instruments, Grade One students have begun reading and writing melodies with real musical notation.  Using the same five-line staff and black dots used by musicians across the world, students can now compose their own music and perform music written by other people – all by themselves!  We celebrated this new skill with the traditional song, “One, Two, Tie My Shoe”, singing it with Curwen hand signs, writing it in our notebooks, playing it on the xylophone and acting out the lyrics.    

Click HERE to listen to
"The Hall of the Mountain King. 

Grade Two students have learned the new rhythmic note “Too” as they listened to the footsteps of Peer Gynt sneaking away from the Mountain King!  While listening to this famous piece of music, students not only practiced reading, speaking, clapping and playing rhythms on instruments, but they also had a rich discussion of how the composer made the music so breathtakingly thrilling.  Students used musical terminology to discuss the speed, the volume, the articulation and the form of the music, and then created their own endings to the story told by the music.  How wonderful to see the strong opinions and heated discussions between these young musicians! 

Grade Three musicians have been celebrating their hard-earned skills by writing and performing their own music.  Quartets (groups of four) put their heads and hearts together to compose a song, writing both the melody and the lyrics.  One short phrase is fairly simple, but it takes some big thinking to put multiple phrases together in a meaningful and effective way.  After many conversations around the structure of the music and the text, each group ended up with a piece that was distinctly their own.  It takes effort and courage to shape and share our ideas, and I’m proud of our students for hard work!