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!