Bringing the Rain to Kapiti Plain is a wonderful book, written as a cumulative story. Each page introduces a new character or thought, and continues to build with each page while repeating the previous pages. It is similar to "There was an Old Lady who swallowed a Fly," where each page/verse adds to the previous. Music is also cumulative. Most songs have more than one layer or texture of sound. Different verses or different sections to song build upon other verses or sections with different instruments or sounds. From Kdg to 2nd grade, we have mostly been playing the same music together at the same time. But now, we are working on playing different layers or different parts at the same time. The students have been learning different instrument parts that represent the different characters/ideas in the book Kapiti Plain. Eventually, we will have 4 layers to build upon and play together. The difficulty here is staying strong on one part when someone else is playing another part! But when it all comes together, the music is awesome! Here are some examples of the kids putting parts together!
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Just a little more Jingle Bells fun! 1st Graders cannot get enough of Jingle Bells. Here they are playing both rhythm and beat.
This week, we spent some time playing through some holiday favorites on the YouTube Channel "Musication." Musication is a channel created by a music teacher in the Netherlands. He creates awesome visual playalongs for percussion instruments. The pic below reflects "Trepak" from the Nutcracker! The perfect end for this year! Here's some of our favorite playalongs... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKarzUS0X78 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbY-HRJW_FY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL1QlSM9vKg&t=20s The recordings below are the culmination of a LOT of hard work! The 4th Grade students have spent months preparing for this project, and I couldn't be more proud of their dedication and collaboration. After analyzing and studying how musicians and composers create music through the layering of voices and instruments, called textures, the students have been working in small groups to create their own pieces of work with various textures of sounds. They could choose any instruments they wanted in small groups to create a piece of work that changed texture in some way or another. Then, they had to collaborate together, making decisions about how their piece would start, what would happen in the middle, and what would happen at the end. The texture charts below demonstrate how their pieces might be organized. For example, #1 below shows a single layer of sound beginning, while adding on layer after layer. Then, the layers begin to fade out, leaving a single layer of sound at the end again. #4 below shows two sections in a song, each having different layers of sounds. We also talked a lot about the value of collaboration for a project like this. With three or more people working together, collaboration must take place for a successful product. Each individual student may have wonderful ideas on how a song should go, but the many ideas may not sound good TOGETHER. So the challenge was to listen and value one another's ideas, and maybe change their own thinking and compromise to make something even greater together! Enjoy listening, and see if you can determine how their textures changed!
We also spent a day transferring the melodies of "Winter Wonderland" and "Let is Snow" onto keyboards! How fun!
After Winter Wonderland, the 2nd grades then learned to play the "let it snow, let is snow, let it snow" melody in....well, Let it Snow!
Listen to the 2nd graders playing "Winter Wonderland." They listened carefully to find the part of the song that started high and came down by steps and repeated notes. Then of course, we learned to play it :)
A Holiday Classic, "Up on the Housetop" was a fun way for us to focus on rhythm. At the end of most sentences in the song, the words follow a short, short, long rhythm pattern. After the students figured out all the places that had the pattern, we eventually added body movements to feel the rhythms and finally instruments. Your kids can tell you all about it! Then, we listened to the Pentatonix version, posted below, and we found the rhythm changed slightly on the final line of each chorus on "click, click, click." This time, the pattern was long, long, long. Take a listen, and have your child tell you about it!
2nd Grade is still focusing on melody! This song, like "Pick-a-Little" has a melody that has a big jump and steps. The song is a nonsense song, meaning the words have no literal meaning. So at the end, we added our own word! Listen and enjoy!
In Kindergarten, we are spending a significant amount of time exploring sounds. We are working hard to identify sounds moving up and down and what that looks like on xylophones and other instruments with bars, such as bells. The song "Up So High" was a is a great example of sounds moving up and down. When we sing the word "up," we play higher on the bells (to the right). And when we sing the word "down," we play lower on the instruments (to the left). Listen to a couple of classes sing and play!
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