Multilingual Composers

This week's lyric video comes to us from the Grade 3/4 Class who have been working hard to learn all the languages in this song, "We Are Children of Peace." All the classes have worked on this song and thanks to Grade 3/4, we now have a fun, new way to practice!

After the students have mastered these languages, we hope to add more languages that are representative of our community, such as Portuguese, Korean and Chinese!

In music this week, students have been hard at work composing, singing and playing instruments. In addition to making our lyric video, the 3rd & 4th Graders have been adding instruments to their "Jambo" band (Swahili).

The second graders have been working for over a week on writing their own rhythmic composition as a class. Each student wrote one measure of rhythms, using the Orff tools we learned. They then mastered their rhythm well enough to teach it to a friend. Finally, they utilized the composition "Finale Notepad" on the Smartboard to add their rhythm to class-wide composition.

Now, we start the process of learning our composition on the drums. Eventually, we will assign notes to this composition and maybe even words.

In the PreK 4-year-old class, we once again played a now favorite game, "High Stepping Horses." This play song teaches the difference between beat (during the "High stepping horses..." lyrics) and rhythm (during the "Jigady, jigady, jog" lyrics). Take a look at the short video below:

The student who is the "horse" does the same thing with his or her legs that the other students are doing with their hands. When the song ends, the "horse" stops and asks the student in front of them if he or she would like a turn. This gives students a choice, as they are welcome to decline. It also encourages communication (asking/answering).

The PreK 3-year-old class has filled their music times with warm-ups and drums. Warming-up is a great way to get students acquainted with their own voice and the voices of others. But, it can be difficult to sing in public for the first time. We utilize puppets to help bridge-the-gap and make students feel less comfortable. Instead of the child feeling exposed, they pretend the puppet is the one singing.

And here the students are doing their coordination singing warm-up. They are given an action ("march your feet") and a voice ("and call to 8").

Each week, the younger students sing "Baby Beluga", my favorite children's song. Baby Beluga has traveled all over the world with me and students find this song calming and beautiful. After we sing it as a class (while reading the book), sometimes we pass around Baby Beluga.

The Kindergarten & Grade 1 class also started working on "Classical in the Classroom" lessons, which allow us to study classical music in fun, new ways. Here they are pretending to be trees on a blistery, Autumn day in Canada. The song they are moving to is "Autumn" from The Four Seasons by Vivaldi (composed 1725).

Middle School students learned about their listening journals, which will be assigned each Friday and due the next Thursday. The majority of the students are completing these journals in a shared Google Document. This time, their first journal will be due Thursday, September 18 by 1:00 p.m. They also started practicing our own "island" version of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," first understanding the history of this song, especially as it pertains to copyrighted music stolen from Africa. We used this playlist to understand how much the song has changed over the years:

The Lion Sleeps Tonight Playlist

In library, the PreKs and K/1s read a book called "Bear Snores On". The students loved imitating the bear snoring as his friends had a party in his cave.

This book can be found in puppet-theatre form on the new PRIS YouTube page, under the Read-Aloud Playlist.

The PreKs also played Happy Book/Sad Book, this time putting the books on the poster themselves.

The 3rd & 4th graders enjoy making their own book groups after checking out. Some read to each other whereas others choose to read alone.

Finally, I would like to draw your attention to a few links of interest. In addition to this blog, I will be posting videos both of the students and videos of interest for the students on the PRIS Music & Library YouTube Account. That address is: http://www.youtube.com/user/prismusicvideos/. Feel free to subscribe. Each class will also have a designated playlist where I post videos and recordings, especially of songs we are using in class. There will be other playlists, as well, such as the Read-Aloud playlist with books from Library.

As always, please forward any comments or questions my way!

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