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.
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
Bianca it sounds like you had a great time teaching this lesson! I would love to see a video demonstration of the game to "Son Macaron" and an audio recording of your "Wheevily Wheat" song. They both sound like great activities and I would love to try them out in my own dance classes. I particularly love the solution of providing students with instruments when they get out of the elimination game. Great work! I look forward to reading about more of your experience.
ReplyDeleteBianca, I am so glad that you are having such a great experience in your classroom! I working with a Music Specialist to integrate Drama into lesson plans, and it has been an interesting learning process. Similar to what you did for the "Son Macaron" song game, we let students use musical instruments as they performed their section of a ballad (for this lesson, we combined ballads and storytelling as a part of performance). For one class, they went above and beyond-- they performed their characters well and incorporated instruments in a unique way. Whereas for another class, they were so consumed with the idea of playing an instrument that they missed the mark of telling a story with their performance and using their instruments to help them tell the story. Using musical instruments in lessons is a very new idea for me, and I am learning more and more about how to properly manage the classroom environment when things can get a bit loud very quickly! I look forward to reading more about your experience in the classroom and how you teach the students about and through music.
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