Artful, Tuneful, Beatful

One of my favorite things about teaching preschool music is that the skills we explore are very fundamental. I feel this open sup the possibility for all sorts of play-based learning and I get to do a lot of fun things with the kids. At the moment we are “working” on the concept of loud and soft, which is obviously part of our music curriculum but also integrates the concept of opposites from the preschool curriculum.

Here are five activities we have been doing to work on loud and soft:

1. Grizzly Bear – If this doesn’t fall under the category of a classic I don’t know what does. This is a song from my Silver Burdett Making Music Kindergarten book (and most other basal textbooks, I’m sure) in which the students sing quietly about a bear sleeping in a cave, then shout the last word (”MAD!”) I love this song because when the students sing “quietly” it often is the best light singing voice I hear all year. Also it gives us the opportunity to play a really fun game. I have a large cardboard box in my room and the children take turns hiding in the box (or “bear cave”) while the others tiptoe around a circle (we stay OUTSIDE the edge of our circle carpet… otherwise they all crowd in around the box) and sing the song. At the end the students in the circle shout “MAD!” and the student playing the bear pops out of the box and roars. I get sick of this game waaaay before they do!
2. Lullabies – Another part of my preschool music curriculum is recognizing lullabies. This honestly does not take a lot of work for most kids once I explain that a lullabye is a special song we sing to help someone go to sleep. Tying into this is number 3…
3. Bean bag babies – After we talk about lullabies we get out the beanbags and pretend they are babies. We rock them gently while we listen to a lullabye. Then we do an activity that I got from 101 Rhythm Instrument Activities to the tune of London Bridge is Falling down
   “Little baby go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep
   Little baby go to sleep, little baby.”
   The “babies” then proceed to start to crawl, walk, run, jump, etc and we talk about how eventually babies get to be kids and being a kid is fun because you can do all sorts of things babies can’t. This is another preschool curriculum connection as one of the science curriculum objectives is for the kids to understand how people start as babies and mature through childhood into adulthood.
4. Animal Opposites – With a 45 minute music class on a three day rotation I have a lot of time with the kids (yay!) and I confess I sometimes use a bit of it to read books. I know that there has not been a strong connection demonstrated between children’s literature and music achievement, but its an activity I like anyway. I found a great one in our library called Animal Opposites: Loud and Quiet that is part of a series. The book goes through several pairs of animals that are loud and quiet. This gives the kids a chance to make animal sounds which are good for loud and soft as well as high and low.
5. Bert and Ernie: Loud and Soft – If you’ve never seen these Sesame Street All About Music books you need to get yourself to Amazon right now. They are very old school but the kids love them and they are fun. The stories are simple and there are LOTS of extra things in the pictures to talk about.

This turned out to be a long post for a simple 5 things. Anyone have any suggestions on more activities for exploring loud and quiet?

I went to a demonstration this afternoon about some Promethean equipment, including the interactive white board, student response systems and sound amplification. I have to say, I was impressed.  Here is a short list of my random thoughts about Promethean equipment after the demo:

1. Promethean IWBs operate differently than SMARTboards.  Because of this you can touch the board with your hand without messing up what you’re doing with the pen.  My students often have trouble with the SMART board because they either rest their wrists on it while they write or they put a hand on it to balance.  The SMART Board DOES NOT LIKE to be touched in multiple places at once.
2. The student response system Promethean makes is a lot easier to use than the Interwrite one I have used before.  You can create questions on the fly and students can even text in short answers (which is cool.)
3. Promethean equipment is all operated under one piece of software (Active Studio) instead of different ones for every piece of equipment.  It’s really streamlined and nice.
4. The setup I saw today had a board and projector mounted so they moved up and down together.  It was an excellent setup because you can lower the board for little kids and you don’t have to re-align it!! Also the projector was mounted overhead and it was a lot better for shadows.
5. Promethean has a reaching tool (wand) that works on the board.  It’s basically a pen on a stick.  This seems like a small thing, unless you teach pre-k and your students vary in height from about a foot and a half to four feet

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!!