This week (9/24-9/28)

This week in...

Kindergarten- we made animal sounds (mooing and buzzing) and learned that the beginning of the song "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep" sounds same as the beginning of "Twinkle, Twinkle" and "Brown Bear, Brown Bear." We kept the steady beat in many ways up high and down low, and we moved like stars and starfish during high and low sounding music.

1st/2nd grade- we learned how to draw in so and mi on erasable music staff white boards. We listened to high and low music, and made guesses about which instrument between two choices would be higher. We moved around the room to show our musical opposites (high and low, forte and piano, allegro and lento) with our music buddies. We also read and sang along with the story book called "Pete the Cat."

3rd/4th grade- We learned to play the poem "Warm hands, warm" on drums. We would play regular drum strokes for most of the words, and thumb or down strokes for the stressed words in the poem. We repeated our Mad Minutes with the notes B, A, and G and began our work with recorders. We learned about how to correctly sit and use air when we play, and we learned to play the note "B." We played the rhythm of the poem "Thomas A. Tattamus" on recorders and had conversations with our music buddy using only the word "too." This was very silly and fun! Here's the tongue twister we used:

Thomas A. Tattamus took two T's
to tie two tups to two small trees.
To frighten the terrible Thomas A. Tattamus
tell me how many T's there are in that!

5th grade- We played the rhymed we learned last week on drums. ("Let's play a game. Clap and say your name. Everyone will copy you and sound just the same.") Last week, each of us came up with a way to clap and say our name that was unique and the class would copy it. This week, we came up with a way to play on the drum while saying our name. We learned a body percussion pattern to go with this rhyme that included clapping, patting our legs, and stomping. We performed this pattern in canon (2 groups, 1 starts first and the other starts a little later). We also learned to play this rhyme on drums and we later performed it in canon. We began our work on recorders this week as well. We used the same tongue twister as the 3rd and 4th graders (see above!) to learn to correctly use our tongue to start new notes.