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!