I can't believe we are in the last month of school for the 2013-2014 school year!
This has been a busy year with the start-up of our after school Worthington Park Choir, SLO Assessments for second grade and some crazy weather towards the middle of the year.
We are now in the final stages of rehearsal for our musical revue, "Gotta Be Jazz", which will be performed by the 5th and 6th graders on May 15th at 7 pm and May 16th at 1:30 pm.
The show features several solo vocalists and featured dancers who have some very cool moves!
While the 5th and 6th graders are rehearsing away for their performance, 4th grade is studying early American folk music. We learned about a kind of song called a 'spiritual' which was sung by people in slavery before the Civil War and helped slaves communicate about the Underground Railroad. Now, we are exploring the fun of traditional Appalachian music and cowboy songs.
4th grade students each played recorder solos in front of their classes a few weeks ago and will be starting guitar soon! Our goal is to play guitar, auto harp and xylophones while we dance to a song called "Tideo". We are working on all of the elements separately and will put them together for our last music class of the year!
3rd grade students have been focusing on Solfege syllables (do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti do') and we've been adding more to our chart, little by little! We finally learned the "mystery note", fa, last week and we are adding one more syllable to our chart before we explore the Treble Clef. I am amazed at how these third graders are able to synthesize information and apply it through singing, composition and notation of Solfege syllables. Way to go, 3rd grade!
2nd graders are finished with our SLO (Student Learning Objectives) Post-Tests, and they are now looking for patterns in music. We are looking for patterns in Handel's "Water Music" and also in Vivaldi's "Spring".
1st Grade students are practicing their pinch, curl and flip (or proper mallet technique). They are becoming masters at playing barred instruments such as xylophones, metallophones and glockenspiels.
Kindergarten friends are learning about jazz music to get excited for the 5th and 6th grade performance. We have enjoyed a game on pbskids.org which allows us to identify jazz instruments by sight and sound. We also read a book called The Jazz Fly by Matthew Gollub, which showed how some jazz musicians sing using non-sense words like "Za zaba, zoo zaba, zee za roni!"
We are grooving along towards the end of the year! :)
Our Jazz Instruments Game can be found at http://pbskids.org/chuck/index.html#/jazz, if you want to play at home!
