For those who also live children’s book in the classroom or at home there are several new picture books out recently that illustrate classic children’s songs. Many of them also come with CD’s. The two I am most interested in are the NEW version of The Marvelous Toy by Tom Paxton and Peter Yarrow’s Day is Done, which comes with a CD on which he sings with his daughter.

When you put beautiful words and music together with beautiful pictures the result is magical. These books are assembled with all of the love and care we would expect from men who have put so much passion and energy into their music over such long careers.

My favorite trick for learning student names is to create a contact sheet in iPhoto on which photos of all students in one class are shown on one page, with their names underneath.  Most of the teachers I work with are taking head shots of their students for various reasons during the first few days of school anyway, and they are happy to share.  It is a small task to take pictures of the few classrooms that do not have them available.

Once I have the photos on my computer I create an album for each classroom in iPhoto.  I will also use these albums throughout the year to store any photos I take of music classroom activities.

When you create the contact sheet it is helpful for the student name to be displayed directly under the face.  iPhoto will print the name of the file underneath the photo in the contact sheet, so if you change the file name to the student’s name you will have a contact sheet on which names are printed under faces.

To do this click on any photo and then on the small “i” button at the bottom left of the iPhoto screen.  This will display photo information.  If you double click the information printed next to “title” you can enter the student’s name.  If you have friendly helpful teachers or assistants they might take the few minutes to help you with this.  Otherwise I find it a reasonable use of music class time on the first day, considering how much more efficiently I am able to learn names and consequentially conduct class!

Use the Info button to enter student names as the photo title.

Once you have entered all of the student’s names as titles you are ready to create your contact sheet.

Drag and select all of the photos you want to print on one page.

Drag to select all of the photos you want included in the proof sheet.

Click “File” and then select “Print”

File > Print

On the left side of the print screen select “Contact Sheet”

Click "Proof Sheet" on the left

The iPhoto default is to create a contact sheet with three columns.  For most classrooms that will not be enough to get all students on one page. If you want all students on one page you need to customize the number of columns on your contact sheet.

Underneath the preview area click the “Customize” button.

Click the customize button to add more columns and fit more photos onto a page.

On the resulting screen use the slider at the bottom to create more or less columns.  I usually use as may columns as it takes to get all students on one page.

Use the slider to add or subtract columns

Click the “Print” button (right next to the slider you were just using) and your contact sheet will arrive at the printer!

These are useful for seating charts as well as learning names.  I hope your school year is off to a great start!

Extra thanks to him for editing his post to include a link to our IWB wiki for music teachers: mustech.pbworks.com.  A place where many music teachers go to share their IWB lessons, and you can too!

Click here to see a video tutorial on how to add reset buttons to Notebook pages.  Thanks to @jameshollis on Twitter for sharing the page with me!

I thought it was cool when one of my Twitter pals (@msstewart) shared today that you can self-publish your own boardgame designs at http://www.thegamecrafter.com/.  Obviously this is cool for your own classroom, but if you really have a brilliant, creative idea you can use the Game Crafter website to sell it to others.

Rather than reinvent the wheel myself I am going to direct your attention to this excellent tech-help blog where the writer has created a really helpful, detailed tutorial with photos and screen caps on how to accomplish this task using a PC and the free program Audacity (if you are using a Mac this is also possible with GarageBand.)

Basically if you have a sound card with an audio-input jack (usually blue, if you have a MacBook it is the one next to your headphone jack marked with the symbol that looks like a circle flanked by inward-pointing triangles,) a casette player with any kind of output (in the tutorial he uses RCA but this is just as possible with an 1/8″ headphone jack, although of course the resulting audio quality will vary) and a cord that can go between the two you can make this happen!

You do not need a special machine to accomplish this task!! Those things are available and if your afraid of your computer they might be easier, but they sure are going to be more expensive!

To that end I make a lot of use of United Streaming, which my school subscribes to. If you are not familiar with United Streaming (AKA Discovery Education) the Discovery channel has collected a set of educational videos for various ages and subjects and made them available to teachers. Many of them even come with curriculum guides or follow up materials.

In my exploration of United Streaming a stumbled across a set of five short (15 minute) videos that appear to be a series once produced in the UK called “Stop Look Listen: Okey Cokey Karaoke!” The premise is a woman named Okey Cokey who lives in a magical karaoke machine. Each episode introduces a song, often a story-song, and leads the students through several games and activities that explore the song. The show has sections where Okey Cokey leads a game or activity as well as sections in which different instructors speak with a group of children about different things, and you see the children interact and come up with ideas on how to act things out. Each episode emphasizes a different basic musical concept that is appropriate for Pre-K or Kindergarten. Among other things the series discusses echoes, fast and slow, high and low (including those important vocal sirens!) as well as drama and movement concepts that go along with the songs. Each episode ends with another full performance of the song including the student-participation elements that have been developed during the episode.

My students find these videos engaging and I find them to be an excellent use of our music time. They do a fabulous job reinforcing our musical concepts and also pull in other parts of the pre-K curriculum. If there is a drawback it is that all of the actors have heavy British accents, but my students do not even seem to notice.

You can show United Streaming videos using your computer hooked to a television (increasingly easy with new laptops possessing S-Video connections and new TV’s often having VGA input) or using an LCD projector (children always love watching on the big screen!)

ETA: I forgot to mention that the Okey Cokey videos contain many opportunities for the children watching to create music by singing, creating vocal accompaniments, etc.  Audience participation is a key element for me in deciding whether a video is worth spending our music time on.

Today, of course, is Earth day, a holiday I feel very strongly about.  I consider myself an environmentalist and try to instill the values of good environmental stewardship in people around me (of all ages!)  Today we did an activity to acknowledge Earth day that is something I usually do anyway, I just tweaked it a tiny bit by briefly allowing the children to tell me what Earth day is about and things we can do to take care of the earth.  I worked them around to how planting a garden is a nice way to care for the earth and then we did the activity “Digging Up a Hole” from one of my VERY favorite books, 101 Rhythm Instrument Activities for Young Children by Abigail Flesch Connors.

This is an activity using shakers in which students sing about and pantomime the various stages of planting a garden starting with “digging up a hole” and ending with “plant is gonna grow”, set to “Dinah Won’t You Blow”.  For the sake of Ms. Connors’s copyright I won’t go into the details of each verse but hopefully you get the idea!  It is one of these wonderful piggyback songs that students pick up very quickly because the words are mostly repeated over and over.  At the end I let each child tell me what he or she grew before putting the shaker away in the bag.

I really think we can satisfy our supervisors by incorporating non-musical objectives without making music secondary in our classroom.  I am very stubborn and feel strongly about children’s need for music education so believe me when I tell you musical objectives are always on the front burner for me.  That doesn’t mean I have to be SO stubborn that I refuse to work other things in along the way!

I also love music and love technology, so imagine how much a L-O-V-E something that combines all three!!  Carol Broos (twitter) and Brenda Muench (twitter) are both wonderful people to follow around the internet if you are interested in edtech, particularly as it applies to music.  The two have joined forces to host a podcast called Musically and Technically Speaking where they share some of their wonderful ideas and techniques.  What I like about these ladies from the podcast as well as their blogs and forum postings is that they are really into good teaching, not just toys.  This is not “what can I do to find an excuse to use technology” it is “how can I use technology to enhance what I am doing.”  I think the distinction is very, very important.

As a side note as a fulltime pre-K music teacher I’d like to empathize with whichever one of the ladies said, referring to kindergartners, “I just have a hard time dealing with them sometimes.”  So true, they really are a different ball of wax.  In my own times of frustration it is comforting to know that I am not the only one who sometimes feels as if I am herding cats.

So if your interested in good teaching, music and educational technology go ahead and throw this podcast on while you commute or do the dishes.  I don’t think you’ll regret it!

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?