2/4 Tuesday- Exciting Music Apps!

Link up with me for another 2/4 Tuesday! All you have to do is blog about 2-4 ideas and link-up!

I am on the hunt for great music education apps for my new iPad! Here are four apps that I am excited to use in my classroom.

1. Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra APP!

I am really excited about this app because our grade two classes are going to the orchestra this year and will be listening to excerpts from Britten's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra. Check it out! I will let you know what I think!

2. ABC Music APP

This will be a great one for my little grade one and Kindergarden students. This looks like an app that would really be fun for kids to explore various instruments.

3. Jelly Band 

This looks so fun! I think this would be excellent for my young students to prepare them for Garage Band compositions in grade 6. I plan on using this with my Grade 3 students this year.

4. DoReMi 1-2-3

This looks fantastic for all sorts of reasons! Pitch matching games, composing and more!

I will try this out with my K-2 students.

Has anyone tried these apps out? I am looking for more apps for my older students. Any ideas?

Don't forget to link up and to check out the linked up bloggers!

Five Favorite Pins of September!

Thanks to Aileen at Mrs. Miracle's Music Room for hosting Five Favorite Pins of September! Here are my five favourite (note the Canadian spelling :) ) pins of September! I hope Aileen does one for October too! I love this idea for a Linky Party! Please check out the other blogs that have linked up!

1. Musical Groceries Centre

Click on the link to go directly to Ashley Queen's blog for teachers. It is EXCELLENT! This is a cute and fun centre using fake fruit to create rhythm patterns.

2. Rhythm Cubes

This rhythm cube idea is a great pin and is originally from Music a la Abbott. Can't wait to make these bad boys.

3. Parts of a Listener Poster

I want this for my room! Check out the pin, originally pinned from Andrea Knight on Teachers Pay Teachers.

4. Awesome Bulletin Board

I love this idea. I wish I had a big bulletin board outside my room for this one. The original pinner is not named. If this is your board, let me know so I can recognize you!

5. Online Metronome

This is cool and could be used in conjunction with my Tempo Cat posters and my Tempo Turn!

Happy pinning and thanks again for the Linky Party Aileen!

2/4 Tuesday: FREE Smartboard Rhythms and a Cool Resource!

Welcome back to the 2/4 Tuesday Linky Party!

Yet again I only have 2 things to share!

1. Canoe Song (good for teaching ti-ta-ti, or syn-co-pa) FREE interactive activities

I thought I would share my new and improved Smart notebook file of Canoe song! I use this song with my grade fours to teach ti-ta-ti. We learn the melody and identify the new rhythm and also learn to play the melody for the first time (we played harmony only prior to this). HERE are the slides from the Smart notebook file.

For the first two slides I work with my students to match the proper rhythms with the words to our song.

The second slide is a replica of the worksheets I have my students fill out. They match the rhythm box according to the words of the song and then copy out the rhythm above the words.

After filling out our rhythms independently, we start figuring out the melody of the song on the barred instruments. I cover up the measures and remove them as we go to keep the students focused and to avoid them feeling overwhelmed.

This slide has the completed melody but is still covered up in order to isolate measures as we need.

Hope this helps you with Canoe song! 

2. Criss-Cross Apple Sauce, for teaching ta and ti-ti

I have been using this poem for the last five years (thanks to a former teaching partner) in order to teach ta and ti-ti to my grade ones. They love the poem and they way we use high, medium and low voices. It is fabulous! You can find the poem in this great resource by Doug Goodkin. 

Buy Intery Mintery HERE.

I hope these two ideas are helpful!

2/4 Tuesday: Fun Instrument Labels and Great Choral Rep

Welcome to 2/4 Tuesday! Link up below to join the party!

Below are 2 ideas from my classroom!

1. Cool Instrument Labels!

Classroom tour photos are still to come, I promise! In the meantime I thought I would share photos of my newly organized instrument shelving.

First off, my white shelving gets pretty scratched up so I decided to put shelf lining on my shelves. $1.00 a roll from Dollarama! 

I got a wonderful gift from a teacher friend who knows my retro 90's style! What cute mixed tape labels  from Target! They go perfectly with my room. I use them to mark where on the shelves the instruments should go. Aren't they cute?!

2. Choral Picks for Fall 2013

I have chosen some rep for my 2013/2014 grade 4-6 Choir year! I am excited! Here is what our choir is singing for Fall 2013.

Murasame by Victor C. Johnson

This is a beautiful and neat arrangement of a Japenese folk song. I can't wait for my kids to sing it. Click HERE for a sound clip! See below to hear King College Choral Arts Camp perform the piece. Lovely!

Amani Utupe by Patsy Ford Simms. 

This is a gem and you have most likely heard it or worked on it with your students. Easy to learn Swahili text and upbeat, catchy music. Have a listen HERE!

One Voice by Ruth Moody

This is a beautiful piece originally sung by the Wailin' Jennys of Manitoba! We have some amazing folk artists here in Manitoba and Ruth Moody is definitely one of them. She has arranged the piece for various choirs, and an Orff arrangement is also available! Check out a live recording of The Wailin' Jennys below and check out Ruth Moody's website HERE for the sheet music and Orff arrangement.

Thank-you for checking out this week's 2/4 Tuesday!

Monday Music Manipulatives: Jitter Sticks!

Thanks again to Lindsay from Pursuit of Joyfulness for hosting another Manipulative Monday!

Things are crazy, but I wanted to take part in this linky party so I decided to post about JITTERSTICKS! I posted already about these little things that I made, but it was one of my first posts, so I figured most people haven't seen it yet.

I use these all the time as brain breaks for my kids. When they have been sitting a while, I let a student choose a jitter stick. The sticks also end up acting as motivation for kids to stay focused, because they really want a turn to pick a jitter stick out of the can!

Click HERE for the how to!

Click HERE for more Monday Music Manipulatives posts!

Tune in tomorrow for a 2/4 Tuesday!

Freebie Friday! Fun High Five Positive Reinforcement Posters!

Yay for Mrs. Q and Freebie Friday! Check out her blog and other bloggers that linked up to her party HERE!

I just posted fun, musical high fives in my Music room this week! This idea stemmed from... you guessed it! Another classroom teacher blog! I found an idea for hand outlines and posters for practising sight words. Words were inside the hand prints and posted as high fives at the classroom entrance. Various activities were used as an exit slip with the high five sight words.

I decided to make some high fives of my own! This might be a great idea, or a complete disaster! I have posted my high five sign and high fives right next to the Music room door. Students will high five a statement that is true for them, relating to the Music class they just had. As they walk out, students high five their chosen statement.

Here is my original High Five poster:

Here is the black and white version of the High Five sign. I used this instead and printed it on lime green paper.

Here are some examples of hand outlines (there are 10 in total) that I have posted on my wall under the poster and that students can high five on the way out of class!

Click HERE for all of my high fives and both posters for FREE!

We will see! I'll let you know how it goes. It will be fun, but maybe too much fun! Noise in the hallway could be a problem after high fiving with the posters. Only time will tell! It's worth a try!

Thanks again to Mrs. Q for hosting Freebie Friday!

2/4 Tuesday! Ideas for the Music Classroom!

Join my Linky Party! Or at least check out all of the links! Thank-you to everyone who linked up last week, even our late arrivals!

I'm including a couple random ideas. My classroom tour photos are still to come this week!

1. The Best Beatbox Video You Will Ever See

So I have to teach a double class in my little room. That's about 50 grade 5/6 students in my itty bitty room. So to get settled into the space for the first time, we watched this amazing video! I fast forwarded his talk at the beginning though, a couple jokes that wouldn't be good for the kiddoes ;)

2. Student Workbook/Journals

This is something new I am trying this year. It's quite a bit of work, but I think it will be worth it. Hoping anyways!  I am trying these Music workbooks out with my grade 2 and 3 classes this year.

First, I bought a whack of notebooks from Staples (4 for 99 cents!) and cut them in half.

Then I decided what I wanted inside them. I decided to put three copies of each work page (that I know for sure I'm using) in each booklet. One copy for each term, which also helps with having consistent assessment. I used glue tape from the dollar store put the pages in.

 I decided to do "Composer of the Season" this year instead of monthly composers.

 Youtube performance video reviews (reflective thinking).

 Rhythmic dictation sheets.

 Simplified rhythmic dictation as well.

 Self-assessment sheets for singing. Students mark a plus sign, checkmark or minus sign beside each sentence. Plus means "I do this every time", checkmark means "I do this most times" and minus means "I need to work on this".

 Ta and ti-ti worksheets for grade 1. Poem from Doug Goodkin's Intery Mintery.

Ta-a worksheets for grade 2.

Click HERE for everything I have included in journals.

I like the idea of this because written assessments are in one spot and progress from term to term can clearly be seen. We'll see how it goes! What do you do to keep track of written work?

Link up and join the party!

Monday Music Manipulatives! Found Objects As Music Manipulatives!

I am linking up with Lindsay at Pursuit of Joyfulness for her Linky party!

I'm all for being crafty and making stuff, but for something different I thought I would blog about munipulatives that you actually don't have to make. Random objects that are easy to reinforce singing concepts!

1. Hulahoops

I use hula hoops for helping students internalize melody and lyrics. I place a hula hoop on the ground and have a student stand inside the hula hoop. The rest of the class or choir sings while the student is in the hula hoop. When that student jumps out of the hula hoop everyone needs to sing "inside their heads". It is a blast and the kids love it. It really helps them internalize beat as well.

2. Skipping Rope

I nabbed this idea from one of my amazing university profs. JL, you know who you are :) I still use this with my students to kinaesthetically experience so-mi. The skipping rope is used as the line on the floor and I have one student jump across the skipping rope (slow enough for us to follow), jumping sometimes above the skipping rope line, and sometimes below. We follow along singing so and mi appropriately. The kids get a kick out of this one too.

3. Red and Green Paper

A Jeff and Randy special. Check out the amazing Kriske and DeLelles resources HERE. This is another way to internalize melody and lyrics. I love using this during musical rehearsals when we are doing memory work. Simply have a green piece of paper and a red piece of paper. When the green paper is held up, students sing. When the red paper is up, student sing "inside their heads". Another easy way to get student leaders involved.

4. Ribbon Wand

I love using these to warm up my younger choirs. We do vocal slides that match the movement of the ribbon wand. Once I have demonstrated, I choose a student leader to move the wand and we vocalize appropriately. F.U.N.!

5. Anything Cool to Use as a Baton

I have a a neat light up stick that students use when they are conducting the class. It's pretty cool and it was only a buck from the dollar store. I have also used glow sticks for the same purpose. Super neat.

6. Wooden Puppet Thing

Another Dollarama find, I use my little tiger and clown every year when I teach forte and piano to my kinders. You can get these little push button guys for only a dollar! When the little guy is "sleeping" kids sing piano and when he is "awake" we sing forte.

7. Gadgets Great for Singing

This book is awesome! It is a new one by Christy Elsner, published by Hal Leonard. I just bought it and I am pumped to use it. She shares ideas on how random objects can help singing technique. Her ideas include using Oreos, balloons, building materials and more to reinforce singing technique! Click HERE to check out the resource.

Thanks so much to Lindsay for hosting this great Linky Party! I am excited to see other manipulative ideas! Please click on her blog at the top to check out the other bloggers!

Come on back tomorrow for my Linky Party, 2/4 Tuesday!