Moose Alpaca - a TRIED & TRUE Favorite!

 

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Five Eggs

Spring is one of my favorite times of year - each morning on my walk I hear birds singing and see rabbits hopping on fresh sprigs of green grass.  And the flowers! Well, if you know me at all, you know how much I love flowers and especially irises.  I have so many flowers planted around my house and particularly love the 20-something varieties of iris I currently have!  

This is a perfect rhyme and fingerplay for spring.  

Fingerplays are so underrated! Teach them to younger students as a fingerplay but bring them back to teach or reinforce rhythmic elements in first grade and as a canon experience for second grade, or add a So Mi or So La Mi melody, eventually adding in an ostinato or two.  Transfer the rhyme and ostinati to non-pitched percussion, add timbre changes for each line and allow the students to decide how to perform it.  For older students, use these as a basis for melodic improvisation or to walk the beat while clapping the rhythm or add a B Section with the names of egg layers - birds, fish, insects, turtles, platypus, echidna, reptiles, and lizards.  Or have small groups of students create a movement story of one type of animal and perform for other groups to guess the animal.  So many possibilities!

For a better image, click here. 

Enjoy! 

Favorite Fingerplays

I love fingerplays, do you? There are so many different ones and the text is typically rhythmic and short, perfect for working on steady beat, rhythmic division, and expressive elements like dynamics and the four voices. They are also perfect to use with older students to develop ostinato (short, repeating patterns that create harmonic texture) and for improvisation. For the full slide set, click here. Here are some of the slides in the set:

Hope you enjoy!

Manipulatives to Use for Remote/E-Learning

We music teachers love our manipulatives, whether they are the mini-erasers from Target, stuffed animals, popsicle sticks, or printed items.  Engaging students to actively create while in remote/3-learning is challenging.  I have been using Google slides to create manipulatives students can move around and wanted to share these with you here.  You can use these in many ways - the final slide has the ones you may want to use with students to go with the Bee Bee Bumblebee rhyme. 

Here is what the moveable slide looks like - with cards the students can click and drag to create new rhythms based upon the traditional rhyme.

There are other slides to use as well in the classroom:

Here's another to use with Bluebird Bluebird: 

Hope you enjoy these and let me know how you use them! 

Chicken and Foxes Singing Game

I am so excited to debut some new singing games this November at the National AOSA conference with two sessions on clapping games and singing games! I just found out today that both of my proposals were accepted so I will be presenting again at National conference - which is thrilling and terrifying all at the same time!  I haven't done my Singing Games session at conference yet and can't wait to share some of my favorites with students!

One of my favorite games used to be Chicken on a Fencepost, AKA Can't Dance Josey. I use the past tense because I will no longer be using that song. Last fall a fellow music teacher friend in the Orff world discovered the original field recording contained racist lyrics "n... gonna die" and "n... on a woodpile.  The recording was on the Holy Names University Kodaly Center American Folk Song Database (which is an amazing resource).  I listened to it several times to be sure what I was hearing and what others said were matching up. The lyrics had been transcribed by an individual (their name was included) but the racist lyrics were omitted. I sent an email to Holy Names and heard back within 48 hours. They apologized and removed the song from their collection while they, like many of us, decide what to do with this kind of song literature. I can't unhear what I heard and have decided to no longer use the song in my classroom. BUT, my students LOVE the game! So I wrote a new song with completely different lyrics, melody, and kept the sixteenth note rhythms in the song as this was the song I used to introduce the concept of sixteenth notes. I wrote a couple versions - I personally have used Version 1 more than 2 and like it better but some teachers have liked Version 2. Use what you want and enjoy!

Update 2022.09.20

An amazing fellow instagrammer Sally shared this with me after teaching it to her students and we hope it is helpful for your students in teaching the game.  Many thanks, Sally! The full pdf is here!

Chinese New Year 2020!

My family is Chinese American - our daughter was adopted from China so we celebrate many Asian holidays including Autumn Moon Festival and Chinese New Year, AKA Spring Festival. This year CNY begins January 25, 2020, just a couple weeks away! As CNY is a lunar holiday and based on the full moon, the date changes each year. The animal changes each year also, with this being the year of the Rat!

If you are born in the year of the rat, you are known for having quick wit, being hard working, being clever, successful, and great with money! Good for you!!

My students will learn about the holiday in many ways, including using all of this from previous posts:

Once we get through the videos and the book, we will learn about The Rat through the song, "The Quartermaster's Store" which features a rat!  

Then it's on to learning Xin Nian Kuai Le, or "Happy New Year" in Mandarin. 

The song and activities are all included in the older post above or click here. 

I will also be using these Chinese Zodiac Rhythm Cards with quarter and eighth notes - free from TpT and available here! 


I also really like this craft project and can see using it as a melody pointer. There are many others with free printables - click on the picture. 

Happy Asian/Lunar/Chinese New Year! Xin Nian Kuai Le or Gong Xi Fa Cai!

Australian Ballyhoo

I posted a few weeks ago about Carnival of the Animals and a HUGE 23 page pdf you can get for free with many activities to correspond with various pieces from Camille Saint-Saens famous collection.
I realized when writing the activities that I wanted a song about Kangaroos and even reached out to some friends in Australia and New Zealand and found a couple songs but these were more commercially available (chord changes, lots of words, etc.) and not "elemental".  They were ones that were cute but lacked content which is a bit of a pet peeve with me as I strive toward content over cuteness.  I was looking for songs to reinforce various concepts used with first and second graders, which is where most music teachers "place" Carnival of the Animals. So... you know me; I had to write one.


First, let's discuss one of my favorite words, "ballyhoo".
Miriam Webster definition:

I use the third one in talking with kids about "ballyhoo". 
In the song below, you will notice * next to some words. Have children brainstorm a list of animals from Australia. Sing the song again, this time replacing the * animal names with some of the ones from the brainstormed list.

You can certainly add so much to this song! We played it as a game, everyone standing in a circle, one player on the outside of the circle. This outside player is the kangaroo and has to jump (both feet together) around the outside of the circle. On "kookaburra", "wombat" and "wallaby", this player tags three other players and they jump together around the circle. Begin again, this time the "kangaroo" will not choose any players but the 3 who just joined (kookaburra, wombat, and wallaby) will each choose 3 new players to join, etc.  Pretty soon everyone is jumping around the room and you will have a tired bunch of kiddos ready for a quieter activity.
You are welcome. :)

Enjoy!

Wide Mouthed Frog - Two Ways

I have blogged about this lesson before as I LOVE this book and activity and it is perfect for spring when we start to hear and see more peepers out and about! For those who have seen it before, HOLD ON because this post has some new things!
Happy Spring! Here in the South, we have green grass, budding trees, and daffodils are swaying in the wind!  
This time of year always reminds me of frogs, for some reason, and so I break out all my frog songs in addition to flowers, rain, chicks and bunnies.
For those of you with snow still, spring IS coming!!!
You are going to need this book, get the popup version- a MUST have!

A frog puppet is another perfect accessory but not "needed" for the activity. :)

As always, if you want the full pdf of both lessons, send me an email request at musicquilt@hotmail.com.
Happy Spring!

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