| Botendere | Enter singing the song and doing the simplified motions from the previous week |
This is actually a pretty good entry song, it turns out, and the students retained enough from the previous week to make it effective right from the start. I did review the hand motions before leading the students in. When the students came in fully from the outside, I had them go through the song just a few different iterations. Afterwards, I had them sit down and we talked a bit about writing notes on a staff... | |
| Written Music | read on... |
| I had prewritten a staff on the board without the clef symbol, and I immediately quizzed the students about what was missing. I then had students draw the clef on the staff lines. One student drew it correctly, while another student drew it one line too high. I think I'll keep doing this exercise whenever I have a reason to write notes on the board. I then finally introduced the remainder of the Kodaly scale, which meant adding La, Ti, and the upper Do. I wrote the notes on the board, and I arbitrarily picked D to start, so that it was on the staff. Fortunately, no one asked about F# or C#. Anyhow, we kept working up the scale on the board, writing them one at a time and singing them. When we arrived at the upper Do, I noted that we now had two of them, and I asked them if there were any differences between the two. Eventually they observed that one was on a line and one was on a space. I also introduced the term octave to them, and noted that the prefix "oct" often meant "8". (I threw them a bone by suggesting that they ask their teacher why October is the 10th month.) There is a hanging display of the hand signs for the Kodaly notes, and I walked the students through them, both up and down. After singing and signing the scale downwards, I returned to the board, and sang Botendere while writing the notes down the staff. Pretty cool! | |
| Botendere with Drums | Reprise song, then add drums |
| This was totally unplanned, but I thought it would be neat for the students to finally play a few instruments, as I haven't used them very often. I pulled out 4 djembes for the students, and first talked about their design, how they float off the floor, and the colorations. I then played one, showed the students a smaller one, and asked them what it would sound like. I then had a student play it once, and we talked briefly about the higher (but only slightly higher) sound. It was, in fact "re" to the first drum's "do", and so I played them both alternating while saying "do" and "re". In groups of 3 initially (eventually I moved to 4 for the 2nd class), I had students play the drums, but only when the rest of the class clapped and sang. I recommended that the drummers not do the arm motions and focus on drumming at the right times. We sang/played Botendere twice through for each group, but for the first two groups, we stopped in between each time through. By the last iterations, we went all the way through without stopping. I then had a challenge for a select few where they were to drum without the rest of the class clapping. I had to hand-pick the drummers this time, and to my delight, they were able to drum the patterns after all! | |
| Eia Makou | Sing, record the song |
| A student last week asked if we could record Eia Makou, and so this time, we did! I had the lines written on the board, and I had the students come close enough to read it. I took this opportunity to introduce the students to the silent count, necessary for nicer recordings. They handled it just great, as it really forced the students to watch me initially. It also seems that when they're recording, they really pay attention; during the run-through before recording, the students were very together, as they *thought* I was recording already. I had enough time to play the recording back to the students, which they really enjoyed. | |
Well, that was it, and that was more than 30 minutes! I'm really starting to feel more comfortable taking an item, extending in different ways, and filling a lot of time in the process. A lot of the staff exercise and all of the drumming wasn't in my original plans, but as I was doing last-minute planning before the classes, those extra exercises seemed natural. Believe it or not, I had also hoped to get in the Irish Jig (a student asked about it after Eia Makou), and I'll try to do it next time. I also had planned doing the Polish "Don't Want To Don't Want To" dance/song from Sanna Longden's workshop, but clearly there wasn't going to be any space for that today.
I have yet to incorporate note duration/rhythm on the staff, and I really want to do that soon. I think the students are ready for it.
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