Week of October 4

The music room is all decorated for Halloween, and students are excited and working hard!

Kindergarteners learned that each person actually has four voices: speaking, singing, whispering, and calling.  They also listened to the story, So-me...Oh and Romeo, and clapped and moved to long and short sounds.

First graders sang a song called "Make a Sound," which helped them improvise unusual vocal sounds, movements, and Orff instrument parts.  They also created a soundscape using many unpitched percussion instruments.

Second graders were able to identify the sol-mi sounds in "Children's Dance" from the opera Merry Mount.  They then looked at Pieter Brueghel's painting, "Children's Games," and identified some of the games in the painting.  They were surprised to discover that some of the games in the painting are things that they themselves play, although the games might go by different names now.  They figured out how to write the rhythm for each game's name, which will help with their activity next week.

Third graders learned about the Maori people from New Zealand and reviewed dotted half notes and meter by looking at a Maori song called "Tititorea."  They also got to play the traditional tititorea stick game, which Maori children play to help develop hand-eye coordination.

Fourth graders studied Franz Joseph Haydn's "Surprise Symphony."  They also worked in groups to compose eight-beat patterns using complex rhythms.  The rhythms that they created will be used in an activity next week.

Fifth graders compared an Athabascan flute song to a Comanche song called "Eka Muda."  They learned about texture and compared texture in music to texture in art by examining various works of art and listing to several Native American songs.  They also played a traditional Comanche game with "Eka Muda" and played instruments with songs from the Mohawk and Potawatomi tribes.

(Remember, there IS school on Monday!!)