Happy New Year!! As our year gets under way, I want to take a moment and share some ideas for making it run a little smoother. We all get ridiculously busy, so I was brainstorming about how to get it all done and still enjoy my life ……and not be caught off guard when I […]
Today we tinkered. I added a step before #4 of the worksheet (see last week’s post HERE) so that the kids could have a chance to explore before they made final decisions. We looked at the notes that they were able to use. I encouraged them to repeat notes and add neighboring notes, as stated […]
I was thinking about activities to do with my older kids, as the concert is over and we still have 2 more classes. I thought about doing the standard sing-a-longs or an in-depth look at The Nutcracker, which are both fun and offer great opportunities for learning, but I wanted to do more composing ~ […]
Well its here! The craziest time of the year…until the spring concert hits! All of my classes are continuously practicing their songs and compositions for our holiday concert next week, so that is taking up a majority of our 30 minute class time; however, I still need to fill the few minutes here and there […]
As my kinders were working on their song for the holiday program, I noticed that they were having a hard time holding certain notes long enough. Since we have been working on starting, sustaining and stopping together (read lesson HERE), I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to put it into action! At first, […]
So what is a dot and why is it next to a note that we know? This is the question that inevitably comes up in one way or another when you are using sheet music. So here is a quick fun way to have your kids construct their knowledge and figure out just what that […]
Last time, the kinders created their silly sound compositions by choosing their sound lengths, recording them on paper and assigning a silly sound to each length (click HERE for the lesson). Today we took it a step farther and experimented with instruments and when to play. I took out tambourines at first and had the […]
It feels like it should be so far in the future, but December and our winter concerts are right around the corner!! This year will be my first with this school, so I am super excited and wanted to do something special. I also wanted to make sure that my kids had a hand in […]
We had so much fun in Kindergarten today!! As you know, we have been working on creating silly sounds for the length of a Note Knack (Click HERE for lesson). Last week we spoke about writing down our sound so that we can remember our sounds tomorrow. (It was a mini version of NK Lesson […]
I was looking through my Discovering Orff Book by Jane Frazee with Kent Kreuter and stumbled upon a sol mi version of One, Two, Tie My Shoe. I was quite excited, as I had just picked up a copy of the book from the library! I love it when it all comes together….with little effort!! […]