Snowflake Half Note Lesson

This one is so much fun!

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A post shared by Aimee Pfitzner 🎶 (@aimee_ofortunaorff)

Using iconic or rhythmic notation, various voices, elemental forms, movement, non-pitched percussion, barred percussion, movement, and improvisation, this is a "kitchen sink" lesson using everything in the classroom you CHOOSE to use. You can use this with your first graders to upper elementary, varying the complexity included in the lesson. You can get the full slide set with all of the visuals on my Patreon community.  Add your favorite book about winter and voila! A lesson with no prep!

Enjoy!

Jingle Bells (INSTRUMENT, Not Song)

 I love the distinctive sound of jingle bells.  

I no longer use the song, Jingle Bells, in my classroom as it is rooted in Blackface Minstrelsy and has some sexual innuendo in the song.  Read more about that here, here, and here.

So here are my top 5 ways to use jingle bells in the music classroom - note, these are all WINTER songs and activities about sleighing or wintertime, not specific to Christmas. 

1.  Five Little Jingle Bells from Lynn Kleiner. 

This song is the PERFECT replacement for Jingle Bells and my kids LOVE it! You can also see the video here from one of my Facebook posts. 

2. Make Jingle Bell bracelets!  

Use jingle bells (Dollar Tree often carries them in the craft or holiday section this time of year) and pipe cleaners.  Each student gets 4-6 jingle bells to thread onto the pipe cleaner. Twist the ends and trim for size. The Kindergarten and First Graders are often over the moon with their special bracelets.  This is also great fine motor control work and counting (I let them make two, one for each arm, so they have to get 10 bells, then cut them in half; 5 bells for each bracelet).

3. Jingle Bell Parade from Music K8.  Each student with jingle bells line up behind you and you lead them on a parade throughout the room. This works well for a concert entry or exit with littles, too.  

4.   Bucket Drumming with Jingle Bell Rock - the version of the song I use is from Music Connection from Silver Burdett Ginn, Grade 5, CD 10, track 10.  You can use other versions and adjust accordingly (most do not have the interlude which is easily omitted).

Jingle Bell Rock Bucket Drum Routine  Click for the full post including score and directions.

5.  Everybody Sing Jingle Jangle from Charissa Duncanson. Check out her post about the song here.

Play and Sing Along

Song only

Enjoy!

I Can't Wait for the Snow to Fall

This is a beloved folk song I learned long ago at a workshop and have loved ever since. The original folk song's words are, "I dont care if the rain comes down, I'm gonna dance all day". Needing a song for our holiday concert with a winter theme, I played around with this one and my students helped develop an easy orchestration and form we have loved using.

Sing the song as written, each time students sing the word, "dance" they strike a dance pose.
Clap "hey, hey" and patsch "carry me away".
For alternating sections, students came up with the idea of continuing the orchestration and humming the tune while doing dance moves.  Here's how it worked out:

A:  Song with orchestration
B:  Hum melody, orchestration continues; perform Macarena movements (this works out perfectly with the song and the dance can be performed twice).
A:  Song with orchestration
C: Hum melody, orchestration continues; perform the Floss (YUP.. what they voted for!).
A: Song with orchestration
D:  Hum melody, orchestration continues; freestyle- students perform movement of their choosing.
A:  Song with orchestration, end with "I'm gonna dance all day" 3 times followed by a final glockenspiel, "plink".

This was SO fun and really had my students moving and grooving. Good for any winter fun!

Hope you enjoy this one now or later!

Frosty Weather and book, The Bear Snores On

First- if you haven't checked out my O For Tuna Orff Schulwerk Music page on facebook, I just posted a video about a lesson using "The Chubby Little Snowman" and googly eyeball finger puppets you can get right now at Dollar Tree in the Valentines Day section!  I will be posting extra teaching ideas and lessons there, so go check it out and follow! 

While on the American Orff Schulwerk Association (AOSA) facebook page recently I stumbled across a great lesson using the song, "Frosty Weather" and the book, "The Bear Snores On".  I absolutely love this book.  My daughter loved it, too, when she was little. I can still hear her making the funny bear noises! If you would like the pdf with all the pages below, send a request to musicquilt@Hotmail.com

 

Stretchy bands are available here - these are fabulous!!  I have also made MANY in the past out of white pantyhose - here is a video tutorial!

 Bjornen Sover is available here and the sheet music and several videos of children singing the song in the original Norwegian are available here from Mama Lisa.

Snowflakes Song for Kindergarten/First/Second Graders

I am linking up today with Elizabeth from Organized Chaos. 
We're hoping... and wishing... and dreaming of snow here in North Carolina!  I am from the snowy state of Maine and living here in NC for the past 18 years I can honestly say I don't miss Maine in the winter. But, ah, the summer!!! LOVE it and miss my ocean terribly!  Good thing I get to visit there almost every summer! 

Here is a snowflake song for younger students. I actually planned it to use with kindergarten and re-wrote it today to use with my kindies. We use the song with snowflakes (white feathers) and ice skates (paper plates.. yup- they work GREAT).!  Process:
Teach song, half the class at the glockenspiels with F's and B's (franks and beans or burgers and fries or buffalo's and flamingo's, however you say these bars) removed, practice singing and playing in the appropriate places.
Other half of class performs the skating on paper plates while singing, each holds a white feather and when the song is over students blow feathers into the air while glocks improvise (as quietly as a snowflake!) as long as the "snowflake" (feather) is in the air.  Once the "snowflake" is on the ground they stop improvising. I award "snowflake kisses" (extra feathers) to each student who stops as soon as the feather touches the ground. That way they get more than one feather to blow into the air when it is their turn. It's so funny to see them try to stop at the exact moment of "touchdown"!
Switch jobs and perform again!
Enjoy!

Holiday Happenings!

What a crazy past 5 weeks; our family moved Halloween weekend and we are still unpacking and trying to get everything out of our storage unit and we are almost done! Hurray!!! Moving is NOT fun and moving from a house to an apartment and then building a house and moving into it and then moving everything from the storage to the house has been a loooong, strange adventure!  It has been fun to figure out furniture placement, holiday decorating, and projects around the new house and we look forward to the day when one of our neighbor cows gets loose in our front yard! Haha... I grew up on a dairy farm and love my mooey neighbors! 
Concert season is upon us all! I have already had one big one right before Thanksgiving and have another one next week and then the Big One with 240 kids on the 17th!  Whew!  It's always a tricky balance, finding or writing songs that honor students beliefs and the seasonal expressions of joy, peace, gift giving, etc.  I wrote the piece below for my 2nd grade students as I wasn't going to see them very much due to schedules and I needed something we could put together quickly.  They have enjoyed the song and we have a good laugh when they accidentally switch the words "candles lighting everywhere, they're melting on my tongue"... haha, giggle, snort.. OOPS!
Enjoy!  Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!  Aimee

 

Snow Snow No Snow

 

 

 

I am originally from Maine, an original "Mainah".  As much as I love my home state, and miss many parts of it, I am much happier weather wise here in North Carolina, especially now.. they were just hit with a massive storm and my parents have 2.5 FEET of snow in their yard and are set for more snow this weekend.  My kiddos here at school are wanting just a few inches of the white stuff, and I would love to go out and play in the yard with my daughter and enjoy some snowy moments!  Not to mention having a Snow Day. 

Here is a song for younger grades, Snowflakes Falling Down.  We used it as a B section to the Snowflakes song from Gameplan, Grade K.  After playing a few times, we let our mallets "dance" (alternate hands quickly) to play high sounds after "dancing high" and low sounds after "dancing low".  Great fun..  Add some finger cymbals, whirling tubes (wind sounds) and chimes and you'll have a blustery blizzard of musical fun.  Oh, and white feathers.. got to have them to blow around, too.. Cheers!!

 

 

New Year.. New _____

New Year.  Every 365, sometimes 366, it rolls around like a mirrored ball on speed and suddenly, whamo, it's here! 
Resolutions:
Mine are short and simple:
Personal:
I began a Whole 30 Jan. 1 (very stict whole, clean eating plan) and am so very thankful for the Facebook group of First Timers who have been so helpful with recipes, support, and encouragement!  I am trying to lose the 20 pounds that crept back on while I was in the middle of moving, Thanksgiving, and Christmas!  Yikes!!!  Need to stick to Paleo- it has worked for me but the minute I go off I gain!!  I have also gone back to working out 4-5 days per week. Amazing how much better I feel when I do.

Professional: 
This has been an awesome school year!! The last two school years were not so hot as I had 4 surgeries during those two and was out a total of almost 6 months of school!!!  So glad to be healthy again.
Edit, edit, edit!  I am in the midst of a book and my publisher and I will begin edits soon- I've already started editing and I am so excited about the book.. and leery of all the work during editing!  The book has clapping songs and games from around the world!  It's been so fun chatting with people in Johannesburg, South Africa, Indonesia, Scotland, and all around the globe.  So thankful for email; this project would have taken years otherwise.

Now to the goody, well, I hope it's a goody: 

 

Happy 2015!

December Favorite Activities

December is CRAZY, isn't it?  So much going on, so little time.. etc.  I have two concerts that turn into four as the little kiddos come to watch the bigger ones and vice versa, then the concerts for the parents.  We call them "Holiday Concerts" but I am very careful to be inclusive and not exclusive about singing songs from various perspective.  Tricky, tricky! So, December is always extra busy with these concerts and sometimes, like this year, our final concert is the day before the Holiday Break, so I don't have too much time for other activities.  But I try to sneak in a few between rehearsing music.
Of course, I love the Nutcracker, so it goes without saying that it is a piece of music I love to have students get into.  Sometimes we watch segments of the Nutcracker "The Motion Picture" version (sets designed by Maurice Sendak of "Where the Wild Things Are" fame).  I almost always have students perform Trepak in a variety of ways, either using the Bucket Drum Activity:   http://ofortunaorff.blogspot.com/search/label/bucket%20drum or using Artie Almeida's excellent resource, "Parachutes and Ribbons and Scarves, Oh My!".  There is an AWESOME parachute activity my fourth graders BEG to do again and again in there on page 47 that goes with Trepak!  Artie also has a ribbon wand activity to Trepak in the book.
In the same book there is a paper plate activity (great for the littler musicians) to the Nutcracker March as well as a candy cane dance and a stretchy band activity to the same piece.
An easily accessible song about Snowflakes with Orff accompaniment (very simple) is here:
http://ofortunaorff.blogspot.com/2012/11/winter-snowflakes-song-with-orff.html (original post).  Here is the song:

Another activity we use is the Elf on the Shelf piece I wrote last year.. dreamed it, actually.. original post here:

http://ofortunaorff.blogspot.com/2013/12/elf-on-shelf-speech-piece-with-ostinati.html

Whatever you choose to do this season, keep 'em singing and keep 'em moving!  :)
Blessings and Merry Christmas!

Winter Rhythms

Still here in Denver and have had a horrific headache today; apparently not uncommon with the altitude! Having an amazing time at the National Orff Schulwerk Conference and so excited to present tomorrow! I had a few minutes and was able to finish a project I started last weekend; snowflake rhythms! Right click on each file, save, and put into a powerpoint. OR, email me at musicquilt@hotmail.com and let me know if you want me to send you the powerpoint. Happy to share! Have students say "snowflake" on each split snowflake and "flake" or "snow" on each whole snowflake! Consider buying some cutouts at Dollar Tree ( I just bought some last weekend that are papery) and giving pairs of students some whole flakes and some cut apart flakes to create 4 beat rhythm phrases they could play on triangles or finger cymbals or Orff instruments set up in C pentatonic.. I sense a song coming on!!! They could even be used by older students for syncopation practice! The "swirls" are rests (have students say "wind" inside their heads!! Enjoy!