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! 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!

Spring Concert- Thwacked!

While most of you music bloggers are blogging about finishing up school, we just finished our grade 4-6 Spring Concert!

Here are some highlights, as well as some homemade costume ideas that you might like!

Grade 6 Orff Club performed #9 from the Orff Schulwerk, volume IV, as well as an arrangement of Some Nights!

Next up was our guitar club, who performed "I Will Wait" by Mumford and Sons!

Up third was our grade 4/5 Orff club who performed an arrangement of I Knew You Were Trouble and an Eric Corbiere piece entitled "Hidden Path".

Here our recorder players are doing a movement section for "Hidden Path".

And on to the musical! This year we did Thwacked! By Dave and Jean Perry, published by Shawnee Press. The kids loved it! Click HERE to view the musical score and have a listen to their tracks!

We had a couple of ideas of our own, including two acting trees! Click HERE to see my process for creating the tree costumes!

We had beautiful renaissance costumes made by a volunteer years ago and I thought they would be perfect for the narrators to wear for this fairy tale! 

A staff member's daughter did amazing job creating the story book. It's two ornately painted extra-large pizza boxes! The book even opens up!

The story is based on a frog prince who thinks the sky is falling. I love the way the frog costumes turned out! 

 Stay tuned later on this week for the costume tutorial, including those cute hats!

We also added Chicken Little to the mix, along with her two "Mean Girls" inspired BFFs: Henny Penny and Ducky Daddles. Those hats were all white and were only $2.00 from Dollarama. I painted each one to match each character's outfit! The skirts with feather detailing turned out so well too! 

I like adding elements to our musicals that the kids come up with. The girls came up with the idea of having Adele's "Skyfall" somewhere in the plot! Perfect! Ducky says, "Don't worry my BFF, I will save you if the sky falls!" and she dances to the song to try and impress her hard-to-impress friends. Here she is: 

What a great time we had! It was a lot of work but it all paid off! And it really helped this year with having a student teacher during musical time. The kids did a fabulous job!

"Stay Tuned" for more costume and set ideas... and tutorials!

- Steph