How to Draw a Treble Clef

The Grade 2/3 classes are learning to draw treble clefs.  There are 2 ways to draw them and the above is the way we learned today.  It's important to wrap the body around the G line and not go outside line 1 and 3.

Music Literacy

Creating their own patterns.

Figuring out patterns from musical chairs game.

Grade 1 students are getting lots of practice reading, writing, and playing quarter note, eighth notes, and quarter rest rhythms.  We play games, sing songs, dance, read, and write, 4 beat patterns.

The classes shared presents they got for the holidays and we figured out the the rhythms of words and made this chain.

Music Games for Learning

One of the best ways of learning is by doing. Carl Orff says "Tell me, I forget, show me, I remember, involve me, I understand." This week in music we've been playing singing games, writing new verses to songs and creating word rhythms. We have been identifying parts of music including form, phrase, pitch, rhythm and beat. Here are a few of those pieces.

Kids Can Compose!

Today our Grade 1 classes were busy writing their own music on the instruments.  Stay tuned for our creations.

This past week we created a body percussion pattern to accompany the poem:

RAIN ON THE GREEN GRASS

RAIN ON THE TREES

RAIN ON THE HOUSETOP BUT

NOT ON ME!

Rhythm Writers

The Grade 1's were practicing writing and playing rhythms.  

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?

I Can Write Music!

I am so proud of Room 11, 12, 17 & 18.  Today they learned a children's rhyme called "Pease Porridge."  We reviewed quarter (ta) and eighth (ti-ti) notes as well as the quarter rest (sh).  We did one measure together and then they had to complete the rest of the song independently.  For some students, this was their first experiences writing music and they did REALLY well!  After this, they had to practice playing it on the hand drum.

Hats off to this Grade 1 student for only learning about this a couple of classes ago.  She did this all by herself!

Next class, we are going to write our own melodies on the pitched instruments to create a little tune.  I wonder what this will sound like?