This time of year I often need a few filler activities as classes that would normally have 18 students shows up with 6 due to illness, field trips or parties where students leave after the event and such. I have a few simple games that are great filler activities but still allow for singing and community building. This is one I wrote this year after observing a classroom teacher play the game and the students begin chanting, "Run, turkey, run!" while passing the objects around.
Hope you find it useful!
Game
One each of printed image of farmer and turkey. Cut out, laminate, etc.
Teach song.
Players sit in circle. Sing song, pass turkey as quickly as possible from player to player. After a few players have passed, begin passing farmer to try to catch the turkey.
Teacher can say, “reverse”, or “freeze” (or have a sound cue for each action) and students respond.
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Today I talked turkey. Yes, you read that right. I shared several of my favorites, many from my Sing a Song, Play a Game book and here are some pictures from the google slide you can get HERE. Please note this will force you to create a copy. :)
Last year I posted about the rhyme, Mabel, Mabel and using this to play with meters of 2/4, 6/8, and 5/4 - which is SO much fun and a good challenge for older students!
Click on the first picture for the original post:
Lastly, Pass Me the Turkey is a fun song with a CUP GAME! Check it out by clicking on the first picture to go to the original post.
Happy Thanksgiving! I am so thankful to all of you who have been reading and following along- we are almost at 1.5 MILLION VIEWS!!! I can't believe it! Who knew 12 years ago that I would still be blogging and publishing, editing, presenting, etc. Certainly not me. Be open to all the world offers, friends. You never know where life is going to take you. Blessings!
Usually I don't post 2 days in a row but this was too good to pass up sharing and it is time sensitive in light of Thanksgiving next week.
I was on the AOSA Facebook page earlier this week and, as always, found wonderful teaching material, tips, and discussions going on. If you haven't been on the site lately, GO!! You will find so many wonderful ideas and if you are looking for a piece of music or need help with recorder, children singing in parts, or anything related to teaching music, you can ask and get various responses within a few hours. Truly invaluable and I have learned so much from the thousands of years of teaching experience there! There are other music teacher facebook pages, Elementary Music Teachers, I'm a General Music Teacher, Orff and Kodaly Teachers, and many others.. spend some time there - you'll be glad you did.
While I was on a page recently, a lovely teacher named Sarah shared a piece she had written earlier this week. I reached out to her and she so very kindly allowed me to share it with you!
The quack sticks are available from West Music here. They are about $5.00 each and kids LOOOOVE them! So much fun! Starting the second week in November, I greet kids at the door and play them as they come in; sure to get giggles and a nice way to start off class; students that behave nicely get to play it on their way out. Yes, dangle the carrot!!
They look like this:
This is a really fun song I found recently on Pinterest and happens to be composed by one of my favorites, Grace Nash, and another composer, Janice Ripley. My focus today was really to work on steady beat as my third graders are rushing everything like MAD and so this was the perfect lesson for their music classes today. I opted to use only the Bass Xy and Glockenspiel part instead of the full orchestration; for my purposes it worked beautifully and we had a hilarious time squawking and gobbling!
Here are the slides I put together with it for students. It was really fun!
Enjoy!
