January 9-15, 2019

For January 9-15, this is what we did in Mr. Swardstrom's music class

Fifth, Fourth and O'Mara and Buckley's 3rd Grade Students can:

Play ukuleles together with others while

1.     Having correct posture          

2.     Holding the instrument well

3.     Placing fingers in the right frets

4.     Reading tablature songs

The students were set in groups and worked through a packet of mystery songs written in tablature. The point of the activity was to get the students more familiar with finger placement on the neck of the ukulele and to work together to find out what the names of the songs in the packet were.

This sets us up to have the groups perform one song from the packet next week or move on to strumming chords. 

(Potocki and Wellborn)

Third Grade Students can:

1.     Play xylophone music cooperatively with others.

The Potocki and Wellborn classes each have a piece of music that they are working on with the xylophone in preparation for a concert in late February. The challenge here was in learning the parts, sometimes using two hands at the same time, and playing them together with others.

Second Grade Students can:

1.     Create and maintain a pulse ostinato. (Christmas Now is Over)

- An ostinato is a pattern that repeats, and the students were creating an ostinato pattern to accompany a simple poem that we spoke several times in order to give everyone a chance to respond.

2.     Sing and move to a song in two-part form (AB). (The Noble Duke of York)

- Using a song that will come back in future weeks for other reasons, we moved around to a two-part song today. This gave us familiarity with the song that we'll use in future lessons, but also allowed us to focus on the form of the piece of music.

3.     Visualize and Arrange a So-Mi-La Song. (Taxi Taxi)

- Using a song that will come back in future weeks for other reasons, we used magnets to write the melody of this piece out on the board. This gave us familiarity with the song that we'll use in future lessons, but also gave us practice shaping the contour of the melody.

First Grade Students can:

1.     Keep a pulse together with others. (Christmas Now is Over)

2.     Discover rhythms of words. (Creating a Word Chain)

3.     Clap a rhythm together. (Lucky Me!)

4.     Play a chord drone on xylophones. (Lucky Me!)

5.     Respond to AB form. (Lucky Me!)

This lesson goes right from one thing to the next all the way through. First, students use the poem Christmas Now is Over to practice keeping a beat with others. While we're doing that, we're collecting a bank of words. 

We used those words to in a rhythm activity to discover the rhythm hidden in each word. We combined four of those words into a word chain to be used in the next activity.

Then we learned about a chord drone, which today was to simply play C and G on the beat over and over again while we sang the song Lucky Me. Drones are an important skill that are used in Mr. Swardstrom's class. It's a skill that is part of the Orff philosophy of music, which will be used in future music classes here at Findley. As part of that same song, students also clapped their word chain while we changed turns and were able to respond to a two-part, AB, song form.

Kindergarten Students can:

1.     Remember some basic rules of the music class.

- We found it important in most of the Kindergarten classes to spend a few minutes remembering some basic rules and procedures back to the music teacher.

2.     Sing responses back to the teacher. (It’s a Brand New Year)

- In this activity students were asked a question and they were supposed to sing back to the teacher. In Kindergarten, students are usually very enthusiastic about this kind of activity.

3.     Move rhythmically with the teacher and then by myself. (Ten Little Fingers)

- Ten Little Fingers is an activity called a finger play. It's purpose is to move rhythmically while speaking a rhyming poem. It helps to embed beat and rhythm into a child's body.