For a tiny bit of non-school-related fun before summer ends! I LOVE the Discovery Channel ad where people from the popular shows sing the Boom De Ah Dah song. I was showing it to my hubby on YouTube when I found this live version from some kind of Discovery Channel event. Love it!
One of the things I am very interested in doing this year is introducing some exploratory centers into the music classroom. Its no secret that free-choice time and play are very important in early-childhood learning, so why shouldn’t the music room incorporate these philosophies as well?
I wanted to do this last year, but as it was my first year at a new school the idea got lost in the shuffle. This year I am being given three laptop computers for students to use in my room as part of a 21st Century Learning initiative my district is implementing. The laptops became the impetus for finally getting serious about centers.
My first challenge was space. I do not have a large room and it was not immediately obvious to me how I would define different areas to serve as each center. The solution to this turned out to be simplifying my life and getting rid of everything I could. Notably I got rid of my teacher desk as I have a nice cabinet and bookshelf to keep my stuff in and on and I spend very little time sitting at my desk anyway. This opened up the space previously designated as “mine” to become the technology center.
Now that I had space I had to come up with some ideas. Obviously my first center would be technology, but what to do with the other 15 kids while 3 are on the laptops? After googling and reading many forum threads I found a great idea for a singing center using either a vacuum hose or a curved piece of PVC to create a “phone” for kids to sing into. This carries the sound of their voice directly into their ear which first of all makes them quite excited and second of all assists them in developing an in-tune singing voice. Once I stopped thinking of centers are something elaborate I had to construct and realized how simple they could be the ideas started flowing. My other center ideas so far are:
I owe a great debt to Dr Mark Turner’s website about music centers both for the ideas I came up with and the overall approach to centers.
Of course what I REALLY still want is an iPod center for listening, but I’m still waiting for a grant for that one!
Peter and the Wolf SMART Notebook
Today I have been working on this Peter and the Wolf SMART Notebook. It has four pages to help my students explore the music of Peter and the Wolf.
On the first page students can click or touch each of the pictures to hear the musical theme associated with that character. Throughout the SMART Notebook touching or clicking on the pictures will play the musical theme associated with that character.
The second page is designed to facilitate a discussion about the different moods evoked by each musical theme. I have provided some of the most common words my students come up with when describing the musical themes. Obviously you could add or subtract words as you feel is appropriate. The page is designed for students to drag words from the word bank into the box containing the picture of the character they are describing.
Page three is a very similar drag-and-drop activity in which the students match instruments with the characters they represent. I had some trouble making the oboe, clarinet and bassoon visually distinguishable from each other because of their size, so I labeled the instrument pictures with their names to minimize confusion.
Page four is a memory game in which students hunt for pairs of cards. I’m afraid I had to leave the hunters out of the game in order to create a tidy grid. This is an unsophisticated Flash file; it does not keep score or randomly rearrange the cards and you must manually turn non-matching cards back over.
Enjoy!
I created this Flash animation to go along with the song “Five Little Snowmen”. I usually play a game with this song where the students take turns standing up in groups of five. One student gets to be the sun and pick which “snowman” to “melt”. Last year I had some snowmen and a sun printed out in color at Office Max so the kids could hold them while we play the game. They love it.
I thought this high-tech twist would provide some nice variety. The movie should begin automatically. After the music plays through one verse (and the sun moves across the sky) it will stop. Click or a snowman (or touch one with a SMART board) to make him melt. Then click or touch the house to play the music again for the next verse.
I had originally recorded myself singing the words to each verse. I changed it to just a piano melody line, but I am considering redoing it again in the winter with a recording of some students singing.
I am back to work today preparing to welcome a whole new crop of preschoolers into the music room. This year I am participating in a 21st Century Classroom program sponsored by my school division and as a result I will be getting access to a lot of instructional technology resources. I am trying to create a lot of SMART Notebook files and things I can use with my Interwrite pad.
I created this SMART Notebook to assist my students with matching instruments to the sounds contained in the book Country Crossing by Jim Aylesworth. This book is an old-fashioned story of a car reaching a railroad crossing in the quiet woods and the sounds of the train speeding by. I use the book in a small unit about trains I do while the classroom teachers are focusing on transportation.
There are many great train songs in the Kindergarten Making Music textbook and I use many of them during this unit including “Mbombera”, “Little Trains” and The Little Train of the Caipira. My students have always LOVED The Little Train of Caipira and I have often brought it back out during the year for a reward and allowed the children to play instruments along with it.
The train unit it particularly useful for practicing different tempos and the feeling of speeding up and slowing down. We talk about how a train has to start slow and then get faster and faster, and how it has to gradually slow down before it gets to the station. Many of the train songs I’ve mentioned here begin with an accelerando and end with a ritardando to imitate the feeling of a train.
As a result of some talk on the teachers.net music forum I have started a wiki for music teachers to share SMART Notebooks and other digital creations they use in the classroom. It seems that SMART Boards are becoming particularly popular in music classroom (where the financial investment makes sense, since the music classroom typically serves every student in a school) and many of us are reinventing the wheel by creating lesson materials our colleagues around the country have already produced. This wiki is intended to be a place to share with each other in order to make all of our lives easier and all of our teaching more effective and efficient.
The wiki is still in the early stages but we have already had some TERRIFIC contributions. If you would like to contribute please get in touch with me so I can put you on the list!
Animoto (the remarkable website that takes your photos and your sound files and puts them together into impressive-looking music videos) is making a generous offer to educators. They are offering teachers (AND their students) the chance to make full-length videos for free (the general public has to pay for videos over 30 seconds.)
Besides the fact that its just plain cool, there are tons of ways to use this in a teaching setting. For example maybe you’re working with pre-schoolers on beginning letter sounds. You can combine a song (or ANY kind of audio track, perhaps a recording of your precious little ones brainstorming “things that begin with the letter ‘t’”?) with a collection of photos of those things. The advantage to Animoto over, say, a slideshow created in iPhoto is that the final product is incredibly visually interesting, much more so than a simple slide show, and it coordinates beautifully with the music. Basically you get a genius-looking video without doing any of the work.
If you would like to take advantage of Animoto’s generosity proceed to:
Click here to see a sample of what Animoto can do… these are photos from the trip to the zoo I took with my husband.
It’s no secret that the invention of the mp3 player made the average music teacher’s life enormously easier. Most of us work off of numerous CD’s not only from our basal textbooks but from any number of supplemental resources. An iPod or other brand of mp3 player can put all of those things together in one place for relatively little money considering how long they last and the benefit to teaching and learning.
I have resisted the use of an iPod in the classroom myself and instead use my Macbook, mostly for these two reasons: 1) the school provides the Macbook and 2) the Macbook has this delightful thing called Frontrow that works with an Infrared remote.
Well, this coming year I am taking part in a 21st Century Classroom program and have been provided with an iPod to use at school (in addition to my Macbook, my cup runneth over.) While this is nice I am far too spoiled by my remote to give it up so I was browsing at the Apple store today and found two excellent options for people who want to use iPods but also want the convenience and flexibility of remote control.
The first is a docking station with speakers for about $130. It has a remote and is made by a good company (Logitech) and has excellent reviews everywhere I’ve looked.
This is a great product but if you’re using an iPod already you’ve probably either already got speakers if you’ve got it plugged into a boombox, and maybe you don’t want to drop that much money to duplicate equipment. In that case I reccomend the Apple Universal Dock which, for $49, simply adds remote control capability to your iPod and allows you to continue using whatever speakers you like. This is the frontrunner for me as I already have a speaker setup I’m in love with.
If you don’t have an iPod to use in your classroom, I highly reccomend getting one. For a few hundred bucks (chump change compared to the total budget of your school system) you can make your life exponentially easier. They’re easy to use and there’s no concerns about scratching, skipping etc. Ask your principal, ask your technology department or try to find a grant (many local organizations such as a Kiwanis club will provide small grants for something like this.)
I created this basic flash animation to assist in teaching the song “Bernie Bee”. When you touch the bees they play either a so or mi tone.
I am working on something a little more involved to use with “Five Little Snowmen” which I teach in the winter. That one isn’t finished yet because I don’t have good sound clips (and I’m not sure about copyright issues.)
I’ll be happy to share the .swf file for Bernie Bee with anyone who’d like it, in the meantime here is a link:
