| Still Gotta Get Up In the Morning | Lead class into the room with the song, walk the class through the staff |
In past years, I've used something slower or less energetic to lead the students through the life-sized staff. But, since we had been practicing the start of this song as an answerback ("Well, Enough Said ... About That!"), I felt it would have been fun to bring them in. I told the students to sing whenever they heard something familiar, but few did. Instead, they were walking through half-giggling, sometimes clapping to the song. However, it was abundantly clear that the students weren't getting a whole lot out of the song, especially for the 2nd class, that I stopped the song after about 2/3rds of it during the second class rather than have it go to completion. Plus, for the second class (32 students), I was horribly running out of room trying walk around the staff lines. After the music stopped, I had students inside the staff move to the sides of the staff, thus forming a square around the staff. That was a bit harder than I expected. | |
| Zingamama | Warm up the students |
Since the students weren't singing as they went in, I felt that it was appropriate to warm up the students' voices. I started with a single echo of "Zingamama", and went down the scale, and only after doing that twice did I put it all together and have them echo the scale downwards. I never had them sing it with me; we were echoing the entire time. I totally forgot to do this with the second class. | |
| Staff Introduction | Discuss the staff properties, note placement (Do-Mi-Sol), introduce Re, Fa |
This was your typical intro-to-the-staff discussion, which without a treble clef, goes pretty quickly. I then had students recall the notes that we covered in past classes (Do, Mi, Sol), and I placed students on the G, and B lines (assuming a treble staff) representing Do and Mi. I then had a student guess where Sol was, and voila, the first student asked correctly picked the D line. I then talked about how notes can be in spaces, and that allowed me to introduce both Re and Fa. With five students now on the staff, I then walked up and down the notes, having the students sing the notes. Every so often, I'd try to get the students to match my pitch, and I'd say about 70% of them were doing it. I also introduced the term "scale" to the class. I'll be sure to introduce it at other times. | |
| Rhythm Sticks | Introduce sticks, illustrate proper holding, have class follow my sticking |
Before we started out with sticks, I had to rearrange the class by adding students currently on the sides of the staff to be in the middle of the staff. In the past when I've taught rhythm sticks, I've had the class always face me, and I definitely wanted to do that this time, mostly out of fear of the chaos if students weren't watching me. However, with so many students, I could tell that those sitting in the back corners weren't as attentive as those in front. Before passing out anything, I reminded the students about some groundrules regarding the sticks (no hitting people, play only when asked, etc.). I first passed out a single stick (the ridged one), and sang "Everybody Ought Know" while passing the ridged sticks out as quickly as I could. It took two iterations of the song in order to cover the entire class. The students responded nicely to the song. We then spent a tiny bit of time talking about the ridges before passing out the second stick (again, to the same song). I then quickly returned to the front of the room with my own pair of sticks. I first taught the ready position (two sticks up and apart), which isn't really an official position, but does have the students hold the sticks in a way they cannot play them. We then talked about how to hold the stick being hit so that the stick can resonate. That took a few repetitions, and I followed up with having the students try hitting the sticks while grasping them as tight as possible. Most recognized the usefulness of having an echo area formed by the hand holding the stick being hit. I also had the students rub the sticks together - first smooth on ridged and then ridged on smooth - to illustrate the effect of the ridges. Finally, it was time for the students to follow me. I first told the students to echo me, and that I'd be playing only one hit. I repeated this until I was able to get the entire class just hitting once, and wow it took a long time. But most students weren't necessarily just going off on their own - they'd just hit, maybe once or twice too many, and then realize that I had stopped. When the students mastered echoing a single hit, I then moved to slightly more complex hits (two taps, tap in the air, tap down below, stick rub), but I didn't really have a whole lot of time to do much more. In both classes, I eventually had the students follow me to a very steady but slow beat. The final stick "exercise" was to place the sticks in rest position, where both hands held the ends of both sticks, in front of the student. I then went around collecting the sticks while singing the chorus and one stanza of "Oh My Goodness, Look At This Mess" (Sweet Honey in the Rock). | |
And that was it! As the students processed to form a line out, I sang "Well Enough Said" one last time. I still haven't found a good exit song, and I'm not sure if it has to do with not really completing many songs at this point.
Regarding sticks - I think it would be helpful to have one pair that wasn't blue, as all of the students' sticks were blue. The differently colored stick pair would stand out a bit and might be more visible to the students among a sea of blue. (The school uniform is blue, too.)
The backpocket items are really starting to turn into a backlog, as I'm probably averaging a little less than 25 minutes of instruction for each class. I had prewritten on the board a lot of the chorus to "Time" from Sweet Honey, but I didn't get to that at all. I also had, just in case Wimoweh, Oonie Koonie Cha, Epo I Tai Tai E, Botendere, and Tuwe Tuwe.
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