Celebrations

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.

Grade 1 Abiyoyo by Peter Seeger

Grade 2/3 playing Old Mother Hubbard

I'm a Gummy Bear?!

Learning patterns to the Gummy Bear song

Today the Grade 1 classes were introduced to the Drums Alive program.

Our 3 rules are:

1. safety

2. respect

3. participate (who doesn't?!)

Our first song is learning patterns.  We realize that we have to know our RIGHT and LEFT or we can easily get mixed up and bump into someone.  We also have to be able to count to 8, feel the beat, follow the pattern (teacher) and listen to the music all at the same time.  It's hard at first but fun when we all get it!  Once we know it, we can start singing along!

The form of the song is ABCADBCAEAF.  Wow!  That's alot to remember!

Drums Alive!

For the next few weeks we are testing out our rhythm skills in music as we learn some aerobic routines / music patterns using drum sticks and exercise balls.  Here are a few videos we've tried so far:

Party Rock!

Wipeout!

Sound Story Videos

Finally, all the videos are made and recorded.  Enjoy our performances by our Grade 1-3 classrooms.

Room 17 - One Hundred Hungry Ants

Room 18 - Anansi and the Moss-Covered Rock

Room 11 - Stand Tall Molly Lou Melon

Room 12 - Swimmy

We've had a lot of fun for the last month working on creating music, sounds and movements to a variety of stories in our music classes.  We've had to learn to work together as team, patience, playing techniques and proper care of the instruments.  We've had to make decisions about what instruments to chose and the best sounds for parts as well as taking turns letting others get parts.  We had a lot of fun.  Enjoy the shows!

Orff Aliens

Room 16 - Orff Aliens!

Room 14 playing the game

Our Grade 1 classes were working on mallet technique this week.  We can remove the bars using "crab" hands and "helicopter lifts."  We practiced waiting and listening to Ms. Rempel's directions by holding our mallets in "number one no fun" position and ready to play "one two scooby-doo."  We also have to remember to be careful around the instruments and walk around and not run.

Get your child to tell you about our instrument game: early in the morning at 8 o'clock...

Composing on the Instruments

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.

How would you sing this?