Similar to last week, I wanted to do a little review, something new, and something relevant to MLK.
| We Shall Not Be Moved (class #1) | Lead class while singing the song |
| Maybe one day I'll learn to try to get the students into class and seated while singing a song successfully, but this wasn't the day. I sang through the chorus once (with ukelele in hand), and I realized that it was just easier to get everyone into class. | |
| Teaching Peace (Red Grammer, class #2) | Lead class while singing the song |
| Similar to the opener for last week's class, I had teaching peace prewritten on the board, although by the time the students arrived, I had only 3 of the 4 lines of the chorus written, which made things a little awkward when I started teaching the song. However, the students seemed to respond reasonably well when taught the chorus. Similar to the previous week, the students struggled with trying to echo me during the stanza for only parts of the stanza, and I probably need to find a better way to illustrate this partial back-and-forth to the students. | |
| Seasons (Winter version) | Review, lead class into rounds, record and play back |
| The review of the song for the first class went quickly, and so I quickly split the class and had one group of students start while the 2nd group started when the 1st group sang the last line. I then moved the 2nd group up to starting one line earlier, when the 1st group was singing the 3rd line. We did have to practice this a few times before I felt the class was recording-worthy. The recording went ok, although I seem to have always one or two students who trying to shout something just so that they can hear themselves. The 2nd class didn't see the winter version of Seasons, so I went through a exercise to re-introduce the song and examine the winter differences, similar to what I did the previous week with the first class. I then split the class and got half the class to start the song when the other half was singing the last line. I didn't try to get the 2nd half to start when the 1st half was at line 3. | |
| We Shall Not Be Moved | Teach song, zipper in replacements for the 1st and 3rd lines |
I spent a little bit of time reviewing the importance of MLK (something I wasn't able to do with the 2nd class last week), and then we dove right into the song. I chose the Dan Zanes version of this song, since it's a lot simpler than other recorded versions. (I didn't play a recording to the students; I just sang it and taught this particular version.) The song turned out to be enormously easy to sing, and the students really really enjoyed it. Perhaps it was something new and terribly easy to learn, which made it doubly appealing to them. I had prewritten the song lyrics on the board, with the 1st and 3rd lines in red, and so I then told the class to expect something different for those red lines. Again, Dan Zanes' version of the song provides some very lightweight lyrics ("When we sing together", "when we work together", "on the road to freedom") compared to other versions. One of the best things for a music teacher to hear is to have the students ask to sing something they had just learned from scratch again - and We Shall Not Be Moved was one of them. None of the students in either class knew the song, and they really had a good time with it, even if it had no movement. I really got a thrill teaching it. | |
While I spent time reviewing the Solfege scale last week, I didn't do that with class #2, and so perhaps I'll try to squeeze that in next week. I also wanted to explore trying to recreate the rhythm of the songs with the classes, and I didn't do that, so perhaps that will also be left for next week.
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