Weevily Wheat

Hello everybody,

I had my first teaching opportunity with Mrs. Naylor's students last Thursday. Can I just say--this group is SO! FUN! Each student was actively engaged, participating, and musically inclined! I asked, "how many of you play an instrument?" And almost every hand went up. All of them were so excited to tell what instrument they were learning, or wanting to learn.

Our first activity we did was singing a song called, "Weevily Wheat." If your child wasn't too familiar with the 5 times tables before that song, now they should be! They picked up the tune pretty fast, and through their knowledge of math, they figured out the lyrics pretty easily. The song goes:

Don't want your weevily wheat.
Don't want your barley.
Take some flour in half an hour,
and bake a cake for Charlie.

Five times five is twenty-five,
Five times six is thirty.
Five times seven is thirty-five,
Five times eight is forty.

And that's it! But we made it way more fun: We added instruments such as the maraca, the cow bell, and some boom whackers. See if your child remembers what a boom whacker does! If they have trouble remembering, try hinting to them that the boom whackers all have different sizes, so what function does that serve?

After we added these instruments to make the song more musical, I had them create in groups the third verse, following the pattern in the five times tables verse. They all accomplished this with flying colors. Of course, each group came to the consensus that the third verse, if the song had one, would go like this:

Five times nine is forty-five,
Five times ten is fifty.
Five times eleven is fifty-five,
Five times twelve is sixty.

In our next and last activity of the day, we played a game much like the one that's called "Down by the Banks," where everyone sits in a circle, hand in hand. The outcome of the game is to file the group down one by one, until there is only one person left.

But in this version, with a different song called "Son Macaron," instead of the people getting out of the game having nothing to do but watch, they get to choose an instrument from a bin and play along! In the song there are different sounds, such as "tip tip tip," and "tap tap tap." The ones with instruments get to decide which instruments would match that sound best. This is a game we just started learning, though, so we aren't quite at that point. We will finish learning it next week.

I hope your students are loving this just as much as I am! This school year is starting off great!

Talk to you all soon,

Bianca Newkirk

Hi, everyone!

Thank you for visiting my blog. My name is Bianca, and I am thrilled to have the opportunity to incorporate music into your children's curriculum. I believe that music can help as a learning technique, and impress concepts on people that words cannot get to alone. My goal this year is to help Mrs. Naylor's class use music as a study tool for the core subjects. I will be keeping this blog as a way for you, the parent, to understand what I am doing each time I am with the students. 

This first blog post is simply a way for you to get to know me better. 

I am from Northern Virginia, right by Washington, D.C. My family and I looove to explore there. Second to music, I love learning about history, and American History is one of my favorite branches of that topic.

I am a music education major at Brigham Young University. My emphasis is in choir--so my primary instrument is voice--but I also play the violin, the piano, and the ukulele. I have known that I wanted to teach music since I was in high school--in fact, I did teach in high school. Over the course of twelfth grade, I taught and directed a middle school orchestra in the song, "Jericho" in a national festival, and their final concert. Below is a video of our last performance. 

This is a picture of me and my husband, Tyler. We just got married a little less than a month ago. 

I grew up learning Spanish through an immersion program in my elementary school, and continued to take classes up to the past year I had in college. If you prefer to speak Spanish, please do not hesitate to do so with me if you have questions for me concerning what I am doing in the classroom. (Si prefieres, puedes hablar español conmigo.)

Once again, thank you for letting me teach music to your children! I hope through this blog that you will see how music can make a difference in the classroom!

Sincerely,
Bianca Newkirk