Green Pod PTA Performance

Green pod did a dazzling job at their PTA performance. Their performance included several songs about apples, pumpkins, and leaves in celebration of their theme for the year, The Great Outdoors. Here are a few photos from their very fabulous fall performance. Enjoy!



The fabulous fall decorations provided by our wondeful PTA helped us feel like we really were in a Pumpkin Patch during our Pumpkin Patch song!




Sweet friends singing 'you can rest your head on me' in the song "Under a Shady Tree".




"Would you like an apple on a stick?"




Some of S. Jones' friends and their smiling faces at the close of a terrific performance!



Center Time!

The last few days in music, my friends have been enjoying center time as a reward for their good behavior! This is a wondeful time for our students to practice their creative thinking skills as they listen, build, read, write, create and draw together in the music room. Here are a few snapshots from a few of our centers!

Ladies reading Five Little Monkeys and Dooby, Dooby Moo at the Reading Center.

A friend offering me a milkshake that he made using egg shakers and rhyhtm cups at the instrument building center.



Friends creating and composing at the keyboards, our most popular center!




A friend listening to the Bop It  Game for her next instructions at the listening center.



You're a Grand Ol' Flag

We have been working on several patriotic songs in music lately. One of our favorite things to do while we sing our America songs is to march to the steady beat and wave our flags! Here are some images from a couple of Tuesday classes. These friends in Mrs. S. Jones' class and Miss Mangum's class are marching proudly while celebrating their freedom and their country!

Oh I Love America!

This week, we are singing songs to celebrate America in the music room! Some of our favorites include, "My Country Tis of Thee", "This Land is Your Land", "The Star Spangled Banner", "You're a Grand Old Flag", and "Oh I Love America". Mrs. Sanders' class from the Orange Pod sang "Oh I Love America" so beautifully today, we decided to share our sweet voices with everyone here on the music room blog! Notice what a nice job they are doing spelling A-M-E-R-I-C-A!

We hope you enjoy!

One of our Favorites!

One of our most favorite things to practice with our rhyhtm sticks in music class is the "Days of the Week" song. This version of "Days of the Week" is brought to you by Ms. Whitt's class from Blue Pod. You will notice this tune sounds a bit like the Adams Family theme song!

This favorite activity helps us to practice playing on the steady beat, resting in the appropriate places, and of course helps us learn all seven days of the week!

Rhythm Doesn't Bug Us!

Hello! Welcome to AEEC's Music Blog! This is a place where you can come to read about and see pictures and videos of exciting work that is happening in our music room!

Our friends are already working hard to learn important music skills. This week, we are studying quarter notes and quarter rests. We have learned that when we play quarter notes, we hear one beat of sound and when we see quarter rests in the music, we know to stop and rest for one beat.

Here is a video of Mrs. Mims' class from the Yellow Pod. They are playing rhyhtm sticks and reading rhythtms off the SMART board at the same time! Quite impressive! Enjoy!

There's A Pizza Place in Our Music Room!

At the instrument creation center, some of our friends decided to create a fully functioning pizza restaurant! At this center, students are supposed to think outside of the box a bit and use the instruments to build something. These friends decided to create a pizza place. It was complete with cooks, dough tossers, oven operators and servers! It was quite an impressive creation and they had so much fun deciding which instruments to use for each part of their restaurant.

This is a nice view of the stove top created out of wood blocks. Lollipop drums were used as skillets, and hand drums used as bowls to hold eggs and beanbags which functioned as dough! The guys even thought to take all the little red handle balls off of the triangles to use as pepperonis!

Here is a side view of the guys at work in the kitchen.

Our very own, very talented dough tosser! So clever to use beanbags as pizza dough!

Once the pizzas came out of the oven, they guys in the kitchen would pass them out to the servers.

Our carpet squares were used as the tables, our rhythm cups as drinking glasses, and you can see the delicious pizzas fresh out of the oven ready to eat! :)

Green Pod PTA!

Mrs. E. Jones' class would like to invite you to the Green Pod's PTA performance!

Green Pod has been working very diligently on songs with a big back yard theme to match their pod's theme of the year! We hope you can come join us on Monday, May 2nd at 6 pm for the PTA meeting and our performance! Stay tuned for a sneak peak of some of our songs!

Row, Row ,Row Your Boat

Another tune we've experimented with on our xylophones is "Row, Row, Row Your Boat". Mrs. Kimbrell's friends did a great job locating the notes on their xylophones, listening for the rhyhtm pattern to play, and echo singing the melody. When playing our xylpohones, our brains have to work on all three of those jobs, which is sometimes a challenge! These brilliant friends did a wonderful job! Here is a little video of Mrs. Kimbrell's stars!

Xylophone Time!

We have been playing xylophones the last few days in music class. We have learned that the music alphabet only has seven letters and that it is these seven letters we see on the xylophone. We have enjoyed spelling words using only the seven letters of the music alphabet, composing, and of course playing of our most favorite simple songs.

This video is brought to you by Miss Donaldson's class from the blue pod. They put on their best listening ears to play the xylophones! They did a great job following directions and playing "Mary Had a Little Lamb"!

Instrument Creations

On special days in music, we have center time. Most every week, music friends arrive at the door to the music room and ask, "are we having centers today?". One of our newest centers is the instrument creation station where students can build as they would at block center in their classrooms, but with instruments. This center is very popular and students usually spend a large portion of their time here once they begin working. They do such a wonderful job planning, thinking and executing that they cannot clean it up and move on until their job is just perfect! Here are a couple of photos of some blue and orange pod friends working at Instrument Creation Station. The design ideas were both original and turned out quite elaborate!

These guys from Mrs. Mitchell's class built a machine that cleans instruments. The instruments are washed in the crate portion of the machine and then they travel down the conveyor belt made of sticks and blocks to dry. They even made a place for steam to escape. Notice the cup tower!

These guys are from Mrs. Shelton's class. They created what they like to call "egg island". As you can see they made two towers on their island with a wooden bridge seperating each tower. They worked so nicely together to plan and build this structure!

Boots!

This week, due to the lovely spring rain we have been experiencing, many friends have come to school wearing their fun boots! Today in music, we sang a Laurie Berkner Band song called "Boots" to celebrate the rain and our boot wearing. In this fun song, we practice listening for what kind of boots we are wearing so that we know when to stomp and also we practice keeping the steady beat with our feet.

Here are some green pod boot wearing friends who helped me create this special "Boots" video!

We thought everyone might need to see a close up of our colorful boot collection!

AEEC School Song

This week and for the next several weeks, we will be working on the AEEC school song in music class. This week to help us focus on learning the chorus, we each chose an egg or a boomwhacker in one of the five colors listed in our school song. The school song has lots of words and is not very repetitive, so we are working very hard to perfect each word and rhyhtm. Coordinating our instrument colors with our lyrics is helping us this week! Here is a video Mrs. Sanders' class helped me make so that you can see how this works!

Do You Have Any Tambourines?

Instrument name recognition is a skill we work on most everyday in music. This week, some of our music students have really enjoyed playing a "Go Fish" card game created just for the purpose of helping them read and recognize the names of hand held percussion instruments.

This is what our homemade cards look like!



These sweet friends invited me to play a round with them, so I got to see first hand what a great job they were doing making these matches!

Wow! Four matches!

Half Note Hunt

Our most recent addition to our "Rhythm Doesn't Bug Us" wall is the half note! We have been learning that the half note looks very similar to the quarter note, but his "belly" is not colored in. Because he has an "empty" belly, Mr. Half Note can eat two bites of pie or two jelly beans or two of whatever Mr. Half Note would like. However many bites the note can eat translates in our music brains to how many beats that note gets in the music. Therefore, we know that half notes get two beats!

To help us get used to spotting and reading half notes in music, we went on a little half note hunt around the music room. We learned how to keep a tally of each half note we found. This activity was a huge sucess! Our friends are super half note hunters! Most classes even decided that we should hunt quietly so that we didn't scare the half notes away! :)
Here are some photos from Ms. Holloway's class on their hunt!

Sometimes the half notes were hiding in spots or on charts that are always right on our walls!

These were some of the hardest to find!

We kept a running tally of how many we had found on our white boards.

Draven was getting close to the finish line, with 15 tally marks, he only had 5 more half notes to find!

Jaylen noticed that the half notes were even hiding in our centers!

Ben even found a half note Mrs. H had forgotten about, so he had a tally total of 21!

Humuhumunukunukuapua

"If you ever make the journey to Hawaii, you'll find blue skies and an ocean warm and clear. In that ocean, lives a fishy bright and happy. He swims around all day trying to say his name! He's called the...
Humu-humu-nuku-nuku-a-pua"

These words are borrowed from one of yellow pod's most favorite songs. All of our yellow pod friends have been practicing their Hawaii songs in preparation for their performance coming up, Monday, March 7 at 6:00 pm. We invite you to come so you can be sure you are able to say and sing our favorite fish name right along with us!

Here's a sneak peak of Mrs. Sartain's class so that you can get a head start! Aloha!

Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss!

Today is Dr. Seuss' birthday! In celebration of this special day, the school lunch was of course green eggs and ham and many Dr. Seuss stories were enjoyed througout our school. Many friends even wore their very own "Cat in the Hat" hats and bow ties! Miss Smith's class from orange pod came to music wearing their hats and bow ties so as we sang our favorite birthday song to celebrate, we couldn't help but video for you all to see! Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss!

Chi Chi Bird Song

Many of our friends have been singing the Chi Chi Bird song from Jamaica lately. The song is fun and upbeat and makes us feel like we are playing our instruments at the beach! Maybe we just have Spring Break on the brain! :)
The real reason we are singing this song though, is becuase of the clever rhythm pattern it contains. We decided what note value one bird was supposed to represent and added a picture of that note underneath each bird picture. We know that when we see a quarter note we clap one time and when we see a pair of eighth notes we clap two times, so under the lines with just one bird, we placed quarter notes and under the lines with two birds, we placed a pair of eighth notes.

You might have also noticed that there is a funny looking squiggly line at the end of this rhythm. Our students know that is called a quarter rest and it tells us to take a little break in the music and rest for one beat. Sometimes we rest our handheld instruments on our shoulders when we see quarter rests to remind us not to play on those beats!

We learned how people in Jamaica play this song on steel drums and then we chose the instruments we would like to play this song on to help us sound like we are in the islands. The rhyhtm pattern matches the true title of the song, "Bam Chi Chi Bam" with its quarter notes and pair of eighth notes. These friends are from Miss Mangum's class in the blue pod. They did a great job following the Chi Chi bird pattern today!

Center Time in Music

Center time is a special treat in music class! As a reward for our good behavior and excellent choices, we have centers. One of our newest centers is the rhythm  creation center in which students can build and create a rhythm pattern using instruments. This center along with the puppet center and the keyboards are some of our favorite of late!

For example, to make quarter notes and pairs of eighth notes, this student used egg shakers for the note heads and then wood blocks and claves for the stems.  He used round hand drums for the whole notes. So creative! 

 Then students record in a journal especially for this center what they created. This helps us practice our composition skills as well as our rhythm reading and writing skills.

Do You Do A Didgeridoo?

This week, many of our music friends have enjoyed reading the book, Do You Do a Didgeridoo? This colorful, rhyming story tells the tale of a character who visits Mr. Music Man's Marvelous Music Shop looking to purchase a didgeridoo. We learned that a didgeridoo comes from Australia and makes a low "wahoo" sound.
Our friends then drew pictures of what their didgeridoos would look like and some even composed a melody that their didgeridoos would play. Here are a few beautiful examples!

Viva Valentine!

We have been singing Valentine's Day songs in the music room today! Some of our favorites include, "Viva Valentine", "I Love You Little, I Love You Lots", "Wouldja Be My Valentine", and "Under a Shady Tree, You and Me". Mrs. E. Jones' class helped me spell the word 'valentine' on our dry erase boards so that we could hold up each letter at the appropriate time in "Viva Valentine". Here's the video!

Hokey Pokey Okey Dokey

We really don't remember the last time we could go outside to play for recess!! Due to the extreme cold, or the rain we've had lately, we just have been a little cooped up. We have been looking for ways to use some of our energy inside, especially in the music room. Usually, we dance to some of our favorites, "Freeze Dance", "Bop Till You Drop", or  "Rocketship Run". Today, Mrs. Pittman's class had a great time doing the "Hokey Pokey"! This song also helps us learn our right from our left, which is something we are always working on at AEEC! We thought we would share in case you are cooped up, too! Feel free to dance right along, wherever you may be! :)

Sing Me a Song About Fairy Tales

On Monday night, February 7, at 6 pm our friends from the Blue Pod will sing for everyone at PTA. Their program will include a clever collection of songs celebrating what they have learned about fairy tales both in their classrooms and in the music room. This sneak peak is Mrs. Mitchell's class, singing 'Wouldja Sing Me a Song About Fairy Tales". We hope that you will all join us Monday night at 6 o'clock for much more fairy tale fun!

Something Fishy

This week, my friends in Mrs. E. Jones' class were kind enough to share with me about fish. They had a visit from Mr. Jones who brought a very lovely fish for everyone to feel and learn about that once was alive and swimming, but at the time of its visit to our school, was not able to swim any more... :)


Mrs. E. Jones asked each of us to guess what we thought the fish might feel like before we touched it and then after we touched the fish, we each gave a report about what he really felt like. It was so nice of my friends to invite me to this slimy learning experience!

Thanks to Mrs. E. Jones for letting me borrow this excellent photo, capturing my true thoughts about the fish!

After our time this week with Mr. Fish, we decided it was only appropriate to sing and dance to one of our most favorite Laurie Berkner Band songs that tells a story about what fish spend most of their time doing. We'll give you a hint...it's not taking a shower or riding their bikes! You might notice that we are very busy acting out all the parts of the song, which is something we do often in the music room to tell a story. We hope you enjoy!

Happy 100th Day of School!

Today is a much anticipated and greatly celebrated day in kindergarten! Today is the 100th day of school! The day begins by counting the 100th student that arrives in the car rider line, bus line, on a day care van, etc..Then a running count of each student that enters the music room, PE, media center, and computer lab is kept. The students celebrate in their respective classrooms with various activities including fruit loop necklaces, songs, projects, and stories all in celebration of the first 100 days of school.
In the music room today, we counted 100 instruements. We had ten groups of ten different kinds and then got to choose an instrument from the pile of 100 to play! We sang 100th Day of School songs and also created a song with rhyhtm cards that is 100 notes long! It stretches across the length of the music room!

So that you can share in our excitement, here is Mrs. Mary Sanders class from the Orange Pod singing "100 Days" and playing the instruments they chose from the collection. They came to music sporting their cool 100th day hats, so we couldn't resist showcasing them today! Enjoy!

Sing About Martin

In celebration and recognition of Martin Luther King, Jr., we have been singing a little song entitled "Sing About Martin" (music and lyrics by Jackie Silberg) in the music room this week. I think this song and these sweet faces can be considered a dream come true for him, and so many others! This video is Mrs. Kimbrell's class from green pod! Enjoy!

If You See A Whole Note...

The last couple of weeks in music, one of our main jobs has been to work on learning more about note values and rests. Each time we learn about a note or a rest we add its picture to the "Rhythm Doesn't Bug Us" wall. We also practice reading, drawing, clapping, and singing about the notes we recognize. This week, Miss Mangum's class helped me create a song about quarter notes, quarter rests, eighth notes and our newest addition... whole notes! This song could maybe even help you learn what to do if you see one of these notes!

Days of the Week....Click, Click....

When we returned to school last week, we discussed in music how we are enjoying not only a new year, but a whole new month. Our friends have been singing the days of the week and the months of the year lately. This skill is one we hope to master by the time we head to first grade, so we like to take a few minutes every once in a while in music and check in on how we are doing. This is Mrs. Gilmore's sweet class singing the "Days of the Week" song. The tune is catchy, listen at your own risk! :)

Snowball Melodies

This week in music, we began studying the concept of the staff, and added a new note value to our collection! We learned about whole notes and in the process, just happened to catch a small snow storm of whole notes in the music room! We decided to glue our snowball whole notes to a staff and compose our very own "snowball melodies". Our friend Silas from Ms. Holloway's class was kind enough to share with us about his snow song in this video!

Be sure to check out the gallery wall closest to the green pod in the coming days to see more "Snowball Melodies" on display!
Just Keep Singing,
Mrs. H

Welcome Back to School!

We are so happy to be back together again in the music room this week! Here is a little video of Mrs. Kimbrell's class singing and playing their rhythm sticks to a song they learned today entitled, "Welcome Back to School!" Enjoy!

Just Keep Singing,
Mrs. H :)

A Few Photos From the Holiday Program

A huge thanks to everyone who made our 2010 Multi-cultural holiday program such a HUGE sucess! We had a wonderful time singing, dancing, and performing our routines in celebration of the holiday traditions of each of our friends and their families! Here are some photos!

Welcome to our Music Class Blog!

Welcome friends! We hope you will enjoy hearing about what we are learning and singing in music class! This is also a place you can come to view our PTA performance schedule, read about the music vocabulary and skills we've been practicing, view videos and photos of some of our favorite dance moves and incredible instrument playing skills!

So, check in soon for photos and videos of serious music making fun!

Just keep singing,
Mrs. H