Artful, Tuneful, Beatful

1. We are working on some transportation-themed music (mostly trains) to parallel what is going on in the classroom.  I am constantly amazed by how much four and five year olds looooove to make train sounds.  They can do it all day! We use trains to learn about fast and slow, as well as speeding up and slowing down “little by little”.
2. We are also preparing (already, ugh) for our winter performance.  We have ONE Jehova’s Witness kid this year so I decided to do all snow/ice/winter songs and nothing about the holidays.  I just don’t like the idea of having a child sit out for as long as it takes to prepare a program.  We are mostly doing piggy back songs, which has made prep easier!
3. If you teach early childhood and you’ve never heard the song “Snow Pants” from music k-8 do yourself a favor and go hear it right now!  It’s the one song me, the kids and the classroom teachers never get sick of in the winter!
4. I have six pieces of cake leftover from an event this weekend and I am sharing it strategically in my building.  So far I have gotten some to both office secretaries and the custodian.  Anyone else I need to suck up to?
5. I adore my iPod microphone, which I originally read about on Amy Burns’s wonderful blog. The children love love love to hear themselves played back on a recording, they sing more enthusiastically when they know they’re being recorded and it allows me to assess vocal performance so much more accurately when I can go back and listen later. Good thing I have an iPod provided by the school because I lost my personal one!!

Thanks to this conversation on Classroom 2.0 I have discovered this very cool web-based music notation tool. You can create and play compositions, share them and embed them into your own website. Pretty useful if you’re using a blog or wiki as a classroom tool!!

http://www.noteflight.com/info/learn_more