Music Olympics

During the month of February the 3rd-6th grade students participated in a series of "Olympic" games in music class.  These games were designed to be a "mid-year assessment" for me to evaluate where the students are in class, and see what areas we needed to work on in the future.  

The games ranged from singing, to notation, musical terms, to breath control. I kept a medal tracker on one of my bulletin boards that allowed the students to see what gold/silver/and bronze medals they won, and the students had a blast, and I had fun with assessment!!!!!

The Events:

Boomwhacker relay-

In this event the students had to read rhythms on flash cards count them out loud, and then play them on the boomwhackers.  They had a choice of playing and counting Kodaly symbols, or actual notes.  If they chose the Kodaly symbols and got it correct they received 1 point, for every note they got correct they received 3 points.  I set a timer for 10 minutes and however many points they had by the end of the game is what their class points were.  

assessement: By doing this I was able to see which of the students were able to read, and play rhythms. I was also able to evaluate which students needed more help with counting real notes, as opposed to Kodaly symbols. 

Music Racer-

In this game the students had 5 chances to work as a group to see how quickly they could identify the notes on the staff. By using the website www.musicracer.com I was able to have random notes come up on the projector screen, as the students called the notes out I clicked on them allowing the next note to come up. They were identifying 8 notes as quickly as possible, the quickest ties my kids got to was 11 seconds! Not too shabby!!!

assessment: This event was to evaluate the students on how well they know the note names of the notes on a treble clef staff.  This information will be important to know in order to get the kids into composing their own music on a staff (our next project!).

Long Note-

What kid doesn't love to just hold out a note as long as they possibly can??? As a parent, I know my oldest will do this just to hear her own voice! But! In Mrs. G's music Olympics it's not only something the CAN do, but it's something they GET to do! Each student was timed with a stop watch to see how long they could hold out a note.  I took the student with the longest time, and that became their class time that I used to figure out medals.  

assessment: There is a method to the madness that is the long note competition! All of these students have to sing in music class, or in chorus, and as such, we have been working on the proper breath control for singing. Breathing from the diaphragm versus breathing from your chest (or shoulders as the kids say, because they can see their shoulders go up with they breath in). Some students I was pleasantly surprised when I saw they were able to hold a note for 33 seconds! Others only made it 2 seconds. This lets me know which classes need more help on breath control so that they can have a better sound when singing!

Egg Note Relay-

In this event there was a giant bucket of Easter eggs. On each egg I drew with a sharpie marker a different musical term, such solfege, dynamics, tempo's, etc.  The students would have to listen to the clue I gave (such as: find the egg that means to play soft), run to the bucket, find the egg with the corresponding symbol on it, and then put the egg on a spoon. After the egg was on the spoon they had 3 tries to walk the egg down to the other end of the room where a bongo drum sat. They would have to hit the bongo 3 times, walk around and bring the egg back to me, dropping the egg into an Easter basket. There was a timer set for 10 minutes, at the end of the time however many eggs were in the basket is what their score was. 

assessment: In this event I wanted to check the students on their musical vocabulary. What did they know, what don't they know so that I can work on that later.  For instance they were all very good at solfege, but had a hard time with tempos i.e. allegro, largo and so on.  I now know that we will need to spend more time going over those things with them.

Name That Tune-

In this event there was 30 song titles and their composers on a deck of cards. One at a time, the students would come up and sing the song on the card, trying to get the rest of the class to guess the song. The difficult part, however, was that they were not allowed to use any real words. The students had to use doo's or la's or something other than the words to get the rest of the class to guess. When the song was guessed correctly then the the person who got it correct was the next one to sing, and the other person took their spot.  

assessment: There was a lot of great things to assess here. One of the national standards for music education is to sing alone, and with others. This got the students singing all by themselves. This is HUGE, a lot of times students will not sing alone, especially if they don't think they sound like Bruno Mars, or Demi Levato, but because it's in a game setting, and they're not using "real words" they will sing! Also, the rest of the class is actively listening to what the person is singing, this gets their ears in gear! They are analyzing what they are hearing, and are able to train their ears to figure out what it is they're listening to. 

All together, I feel as if this was a GREAT form of assessment for me. It gave me some very invaluable information on the students, where they are, and what areas we need to improve upon. It was done in a way that allowed the students to have fun, and allowed me to administer assessments without them having to be the same old, same old. 

Musically yours,

Mrs. G

MIOSM-Music in our Schools Month!

March is MIOSM, otherwise known as Music in our Schools Month! As an advocacy exercise the school district's band director and myself have been having the students fill in the blank to the statement "Music makes me **_______**!" Some of the students have put a lot of thought and attention into this statement! My personal favorite is a student that said Music makes them a better student!

Together the band director and myself have had the kids create cards with their fill in the blank items and created a bulletin board that is at the center of our school so every day the whole school passes by and can think to themselves, "Music makes me **_______**!"

Our goal is to have the entire board filled with different student's ideas by the end of March!

It's been awhile!

Good Morning Mrs. G's musical machine followers! It has been quite a long time since I've posted about the wonderful happenings here at Snyder Elementary.  However, I have good reason for it! I just recently returned from my maternity leave.  On November 7, 2013 I had a beautiful little boy, 7 lbs 10 ounces, blue eyes, all ten fingers and all ten toes! :-)

I am extremely happy to be back at school with my other "kids", all 600 of them! I hope to have some new fun things updated on here soon. Please check back soon to see how my kids take on the "2014 music Olympics!"

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.