Come on down to the music room during our Student-Led Conferences this Thursday, March 16th and check out our Instrument Petting Zoo from 4:30-7:00.
Parent-Teacher meetings are on Friday, March 17th (between 9:00-11:30) and by appointment only so please call the school to schedule a 10 minute conference if you need to see Ms. Rempel.
This week, the Grade 2/3 classes were learning some Spanish and having some fun making a musical burrito on the instruments. Lesson suggestions from Artie Almeida in Mallet Madness Strikes Again.
Here's a little video to practice counting from 1-10 in Spanish (Uno, Dos, Tres):
We also had spent some time in December learning songs from South America, including several Spanish songs. Here's a fun one with some choreography called My Amigos from Plank Road Publishing. What kind of flavour is the music? Can you identify the Latin American instruments in the song?
Yesterday the Grade 4/5 classes dusted off our boomwhackers for a little end of the week fun. Boomwhackers are a RAINBOW of colors and notes that lead students to a pot of musical gold. They are tuned plastic percussion tubes that vary in lengths according to their pitches. We play by (gently!) striking almost anything: a table, the floor, your thigh or hand, a shoe. They are not only WHACKY and fun – these instruments are therapeutic and accessible for all.
This following activity hit many outcomes and skills in a very short amount of time.
We also learned about octaves. We know that the musical alphabet has 7 letters.
Once we get to repeating the pattern, that next note becomes the eighth note, which is an octave. One is the high and one is the low. When we add a special cap to the boomwhacker, we can create a high and low note that is exactly 8 notes apart.
Global School Play Day is an event promoting the importance of unstructured play in schools. Unstructured play helps children develop 21st century skills. Since our music classes are only 30 minutes, there are some very expensive things in our room and we have a smaller space to play in, the loudness can be overwhelming when trying out instruments, but we still managed to play and explore lots of things. Here are some of the things the kids loved to do.
This year we are LOVING our new instruments! It's been alot of fun trying them out. Thank-you to MusiCounts and all the sponsors of this Caras music grant that have allowed us to purchase many new instruments for our school. Here is alittle video that was made of some of our music journey at Stevenson-Britannia.
Thank-you Ms. Couch and Ms. Amaral for your words in the recent SJASD Contact Newspaper.
For term 2, our classes did a variety of music activities and practiced many instrument and team building skills. One of our highlights was playing together on the barred instruments and creating songs and stories.
The Orff approach to music education for young children was founded by the well-known German composer and music educator Carl Orff (1895-1982), and developed by Gunild Keetman (1904-1990). The Orff approach to music education was introduced to Canada in 1974 and advocates that music teaching be experimental and elemental.
The basic elements of music (rhythm, melody, harmony, timbre, form, and expression) are experienced through a pedagogy of imitation, exploration, literacy, improvisation, and composition.
The Orff teaching process involves speech, song, movement, recorder playing, playing of pitched and unpitched percussion instruments, and listening. The pitched instruments used are primarily barred instruments, or Orff instruments as they are also called, as Carl Orff designed them to be used by young children for making music.
You can read more about the Orff approach by checking out the Manitoba Orff Chapter website: http://www.manitobaorff.org
The Manitoba Orff Chapter provides workshops and resources to elementary music teachers throughout the province. Orff Club
There is an Orff club that will begin in the second half of the year for any interested grade 4 and 5 students and grade 2 and 3 students. This once-a-week lunch time club will explore playing more challenging instrumental pieces with the Orff instruments, with the addition of song, speech, movement and recorder.
Mrs. Lowe's class showing "One two scooby doo." Are you ready Freddy?
Today was an exciting day for the Kindergartens in music. We all got to play the barred instruments! Today we were learning what it looks and sounds like to use these really cool instruments.
Mrs. Grant's room showing "Number one, no fun!" :(
Grade 4/5 students have been studying sound in their Science classes. They have had a few classes now to explore the sounds of a variety of instruments in the music room including pitched and non-pitched. In the following pictures, students are given a variety of instruments and ask to identify and sort various sounds according to their own criteria. Can you guess how they sorted these?
Grade 3 students were hard at work creating melody patterns for their poems on the barred instruments. We set up our instruments by taking off F and C. The melody was only on B-A-G notes. We got to share some of our patterns with the rest of the class and then we sang them. Will blog about them another day.
