Like many schools, we are on Spring Break this week, but of course in the back of my mind, I am thinking about what lessons I will do with 
my students next week. The week before break I started a lesson with the story of Goldilocks and The Three Bears that I want to build on. It started off as an exploration activity and will end as a beautiful composition!
After the Fossils lesson, I was inspired to take out more instruments, so I put out all of our bass bars. We have six ~ 2 sub-contra C’s, 2 sub-contra E’s and 2 contra G’s. I gave each kid a mallet and let them have at it! They enjoyed moving around and listening to the sounds each made. We then sat down and spoke a little about what they saw and heard. Do all of these instruments look the same? How are they different? Do they look like the xylophones that we looked at last time? …. or the metallophones? Were the sounds the same? Different? How? Etc.…
After the exploration, we decided that the sounds we heard were low, medium and high. …..what pops into my head? Why, the story of Goldilocks and The Three Bears, of course!! Here is what we did:
- I had the book on hand, just in case, but I asked the kids to retell the story. If they didn’t know it, as some of the three’s and four’s did not, I read the book.
- I asked the kids if we could assign an instrument to each bear. They assigned the lowest bass bars to the papa bear, the middle bars to the mama bear and the highest to the baby bear.
- We then went through the story again, but this time, I assigned kids to each bar and had them play ONLY when their bear was mentioned. When the bear spoke, that particular bar played. …. Goldilocks was a tambourine. For whatever reason, it seemed to make sense to me 😊
This took up the entire class time.
LESSON EXTENSION:
I am excited to build on this next week!! For Kinders and First, I want to add rhythm to the following lines:
- Some-one’s been eat-ing my | por-ridge | ~ M I M I | d d |
- And ate it all | up ~ I I I I | I Z Z Z|
- Some-one’s been sit-ting in | my chair | ~ M I M I | d d |
- And broke it to | pieces | ~ I I I I | d d |
- Some-one’s been sleep-ing in | my bed | ~ M I M I | d d |
- And is still sleep-ing | here | ~ M I I I | I Z Z Z |
KIDS: When their bear speaks these lines (of course I changed them a bit to make the rhythm easy), instead of just playing randomly, as they did before, this time they will play the rhythm. After having lots of practice with this, the first graders and I will work out the lines in Note Knacks.
LESSON EXTENSION 2:
From there, we can take it even further!! We can use these 12 measures as an A section and create a B section. Hand out NK to small groups and let them take it from there!! I’ll let you know how it turns out!
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