Mr. Maraca takes on Mexico

For those of you who don't know who Mr. Maraca is, let me introduce you!

 This is Mr. Maraca! He travels to different countries around the world on vacation and brings back slideshows of his travels to my general music classroom.  In his slideshows the students learn about the similarities and differences between the United States and the places he visits, some different traditions or holidays of those places, and (the best part!) the music of those countries!

Recently Mr. Maraca went on vacation to Mexico for the Day of the Day celebrations. Here's a sneak peak at his adventures...

Generally, the full PowerPoint, which can be purchased at my Teachers Pay Teachers store, I use with 4th-6th grade.  Then I use an adaptation of the PowerPoint for my younger grades.  

To tie into the Day of the Dead celebrations that Mr. Maraca teaches us, and the music of Mexico, primarily Mariachi bands, I have the younger grades reinforce the beginning notation of Ta and Titi with a "color by number" type page while we listen to the Mariachi music.  

  

After we colored our pages we cut them out and used them as masks, and danced and celebrated to some Mariachi music. 

Presenting Mrs. Hollaran's 6th grade class

After the students learned the proper techniques to play boomwhackers (you can check out the boomwhacker introduction here) the students took the first step towards composing their own boomwhacker melodies.

 The students are still learning how to read a 5 line staff. This is the first step in learning to read/write music. By using this grid they can add the ta, titi, and tikatika notation to write the music. The different colors indicate which boomwhacker is playing at what time.  When there are multiple colors in one box, than multiple boomwhackers are playing at the same time.  This also gets the students ready to ready music, they read music the same as reading a book, from left to right.

This was one group's composition in Mrs. Hallaran's 6th grade class. The students had to compose the music, practice the music together, and perform it for the class in a boomwhacker recital!

Here is the very first boomwhacker performance by these wonderful students!

Boomwhacker Warm Ups

I am super excited to announce that this year in general music we have brand new instruments, BOOMWHACKERS!!!!!!!!!!!! 

Boomwhackers are plastic tubes in varying length's that when "whacked" on different surfaces will produce a note.  These instruments are great tools to teach rhythm, notes on a staff, sight reading, and solfege.  They are also great tools in helping the students learn to become composers.  Another added bonus is that students who play these instruments are only responsible for one or two notes at a time. When playing something like a recorder they have to be able to play multiple notes at once.  This gives the students more time to process what they are playing, before going onto an instrument that is more demanding in the amount of notes to be played. 

To introduce the Boomwhackers we used a boomwhacker warm-up PowerPoint that I developed. 

First thing is first, the RULES! These are important so the students know the expectations that I have for them when playing the instruments. These are instruments are meant to be "whacked" on things, so it is important to establish what to whack and what not to whack.  

 After the rules we show them the first step which is reading on a 2 line staff. Eventually students will be able to read on a 5 line staff, but to start we are only using 2 notes, sol and mi.

 Then the students get to play 5 different warm ups using the sol & mi boomwhacker tubes. Here is one example:

 It's still important that the students sing, and the boomwhackers also teach solfege, so after playing the warm ups, we sing them using the solfege counterparts.

Here is an example of the solfege warm ups!

Pennsylvania Common Core and General Music.

There has been a lot of emphasis placed on all teachers, not just the classroom teachers, about the new Pennsylvania Common Core standards.  As a "specials" teacher these new standards do not directly effect my classes, meaning they new standards are not written out "xyz" on how to use them in my type of classroom setting.  However, it is still expected that we try to incorporate as many of these standards into our teaching as possible.

In order to do this I have been reading the standards and then try to figure out a way I can change my lessons to meet those standards.  A big emphasis that we have been going over with the entire elementary school is the emphasis on writing.  In my class we have journals that 4-6 write in every day, however their writing is more copying then using creativity to write a story.  This year we tried a brand new project to help the students creatively write, while listening to Igor Stravinsky's "The Firebird". In this writing assignment I was looking for creative writing, correct spelling, punctuation, and capitalization of words.

In this project the students listen to an 8 minute portion of the Firebird (The "Infernal Dance") and from only listening to the music they had to come up with a story of what they thought the ballet was about.  As a fun added twist they worked as a class, each person was in charge of writing one sentence to add to our story.  At the end we read all of the sentences together to see what we thought as a group the Firebird was about.

 After their story was finished I read the real story by Stravinsky. Then as a class we used the ven diagram technique to compare and contrast our story with Stravinsky's.  Following is what the final project looked like.  These are examples from Mrs. Lyon's 5th grade class.

Welcome back 2013-2014!

Welcome back to school!!!!!!!!! Summer was a great time for some R & R and getting some new great ideas to be used in the music classroom this year! This is the students first week back, they started on Tuesday, and I have to say I am over joyed with how much they seem to have retained from last year! I am constantly amazed at the growth and potential of the students here at Snyder Elementary!

This school year will be the best, by far! I have had some great conversations with some other amazing music educators that will help the students not only evolve in their musical lives, but together with their other subjects to help them become well rounded young men and women. Isn't that just music to your ears!!

The first week of school I decided to just jump right in as if we never left! I have been pleasantly surprised to find out how much the students seemed to appreciate this idea! So here it is, our first week's PowerPoint! The song the students learned this week is called "Welcome, Welcome" in this song we are able to teach it to all of k-6 and each grade has some extra things they learn from it. From getting to know the students in kindergarten to playing on the bell sets in 6th grade "Welcome, welcome" has been a hit!

 Game 1 we play with Kindergarten and 1st grade, the students learn the song, and then keep a steady beat (one of the objectives for the months of August/September!) by passing a bean bag around the circle. Whomever the bean bag lands on they get to choose from a pile of instruments in the middle of the circle to play!

By second and third grade the students are beginning to read music notation by using pictures that will coincide with the length of the notes. the students play and sing the "notes" using body percussion.

 

 Fourth grade students are reading stick notation, which is helping in the transition to reading actual notes. They play these notes on different non pitched percussion instruments.

Finally, fifth and sixth grade will be reading the actual notes! This is new for them! I am very impressed with where they are at so far! This is my 2nd full time year at this school and the students have come very far! They can keep a steady beat, read stick notation, talk about composers, critically analyze music we listen to, and in the past 2 days they've latched onto real notes! Makes me one proud teacher!!

If you're interested in the full PowerPoint please feel free to take a look at my Teachers Pay Teachers Store which (cue dramatic music) I am having a sale right now!!!You can access my store here Teachers Pay Teachers. Happy music making to all of my colleagues, students, and friends in the upcoming school year! 

Musically yours,

Mrs. G

1st and 3rd Grade Concert

1st and 3rd grade Spring Concert

Finally I have time to catch up on the blog! These past few months have been a whirlwind of events, from concerts, to talent shows, grades, and inventory I have to say I am very grateful to have this first full time year under my belt! That being said I now have the time to brag about my wonderful students and all the great accomplishments that they did in the past few months!

1st and 3rd grade do a concert together here at Snyder Elementary.  My goal for students in these ages is to have a concert that gets their feet wet in singing and performing in front of a group.  I also find it important that because the students are still very young that the concert is about a half hour-45 minutes long so that they can get home for homework/dinner/bedtime, maybe it's the mom in me, but it is on a school night!

This is my wonderful first grade! They sang a children's music called "The Box" by Mark Burrows. In this musical the students sing songs about using their imagination to turn a plain ordinary cardboard box into anything they can dream up. They sang songs including, Anything can happen in a fairy tale, Rocket ship, and Take it from your Teachers, to name a few!





With 3rd grade I wanted the students to start to learn about acting and and performing in a musical. Together we put on a great show, The Princess and the Frog! Each of the 42 actors had costumes that were graciously made by an amazing woman, Mary Hurr, all by hand, and with only donated materials! She really helped the kids feel important and special as they got to partake in a show complete with costumes!

Teachers Pay Teachers Sale!

Here we are! The LAST full week of school, and the end of my first full time year of teaching! It has been a fantastic year filled with ups and downs. I will take everything I learned from this year and continue to grow as an educator.

Since it is the last week of school I have decided to throw a sale on all of my Teachers Pay Teachers products.  Please take a minute to look at what I have. There are games for the end of the year, and some ideas to get a jump start on next year's plans.

Happy summer everybody! Until next year!!!

~Mrs. G

Jeopardy- Review for Grade 2

Here it is, the end of the school year!! How we got here so fast is beyond me.  However, we are not done...yet! I find this time of year to be the perfect time to assess how far the students have come from the beginning of the year I like to do this with a few weeks of games.  This particular game (my favorite) is the classic Jeopardy!

 Second grade took a big chunk of the year to learn about the instrument families.  To evaluate and see where the students are at we played Jeopardy, the instrument version! Each category is a different instrument family, Brass, Woodwind, Strings and Percussion!

 The following are sample questions that are from each category. The colored part on the bottom is the question and the lighter blue portion is the answer that I was looking for.

The students did a FANTASTIC job this year!!! I can't wait until we have the opportunity to learn some new exciting things in 3rd grade, including **Drum roll please** the 3rd grade musical!

Where in the World is Mr. Maraca?? RUSSIA

 This time Mr. Maraca is visiting Russia! This month in composer corner students are learning about Sergei Prokofiev, so I thought it would be the perfect time to introduce the country of Russia, they're similarities and differences not on in music, but their country and economics as well.

In the first slide I use animation to go one line at a time with the students. Each sentence is a clue to let the students figure out where Mr. Maraca is.  Finally the word RUSSIA presents itself at the bottom (after all clues are given) so that they can guess!

One of the most important things I like to discuss with the students are the similarities and differences in our American culture with the other countries. This doesn't always mean we are only talking about the music background, but sometimes about their economy and culture. One of the National Standards for Music education is: 9. Understanding music in relation to history and culture. In order to do this successfully I think that it is important to show the students other historical facts about those countries to help them understand where music comes into play.

 After students learn about the culture/economy we discuss some of the famous genre's of music and the famous composers.  Here are a few of the composers we spoke about.

Many countries have their own form of instruments. This slide shows historical Russian instruments, and then we decide as a group which of the 4 traditional family of instruments they belong in.

Peter and the Wolf is a famous children's symphony that is written by our composer of the month, Sergei Prokofiev. This symphony introduces the instruments of the orchestra to the students through music and through a story that Prokofiev wrote. Students have a chance to watch the Disney version of this in class.

After watching Peter and the Wolf we do a matching game to see who was paying attention! Which instrument goes with which character? Each character in Peter and the Wolf is assigned a specific instrument that always plays when their character is on screen.





Those are only part of the slides for Russia, however if you would like to get the entire PowerPoint please visit my store at Teachers Pay Teachers