| We Shall Not Be Moved (Sweet Honey In The rock) | Lead class while listening to recording |
| Unlike Dan Zanes' version of the song, Sweet Honey In The Rock has a much more animated, more gospel-like recording of the song, and I wanted to expose the students to a different way to sing/perform a known song. (I was hoping that the students remembered the song that they enjoyed so much from the previous week.) I had the students listen to the song for about a minute, and after stopping the playback, I asked them if anyone recognized the song. A few did pick out "We Shall" out of the song (there's so much activity in the recording that it can be tough at times), and so I continued the playback while pointing to the prewritten lyrics. I also spent about a minute asking the students if they knew of songs that could be sung in different ways. The only example of that they came up with was actually Seasons, where instead of changing the music/rhythm/tempo, the words were changed. I couldn't think of common songs that the students would have known to be sung in different ways off the top of my head, so I moved on. (I should have just played some stuff off of my computer, which has some examples, including Over the Rainbow.) | |
| Rhythm Practice | Practice clapping eighth notes |
| As a prelude to the next exercise, I wanted to get the students to become comfortable thinking in terms of offbeats, or at least in terms of eighth notes given quarters. I first had the students clap steadily with me. I then took a tambourine, and played it twice as fast, while I continued to clap (with my other hand - one hand clapping! :) ) and step at a slow and regular pace. I next asked the students to describe the differences between the tambourine and the clapping - and while some students talked about how I was playing something different, only about the 5th or 6th answer did someone note that I was going faster. How much faster was something that the students would figure out only after several more demonstrations. I then asked the students to pretend they were playing the tambourine, but without tambourines (there weren't enough for the class); they'd just tap their knees while they were seated. I then started up quarters, while trying to get the students to clap eighths. It took reminding the students to listen first before tapping, and it took several iterations before most of the class was able to do what I was hoping for - tapping eighths. Each time the students would just tap quarters with me, and slowly students would trickle in eighths. The class had a tendency to speed up, so I reminded them again to watch and listen for me, even though they were doing something slightly different. I then repeated, varying the speed of the quarters; I never got excessively fast, although I sort of wanted to do so just to see if they could do it. | |
| Rhythm of Seasons | Write out/reverse-engineer Kodaly rhythms for lines of Seasons |
| This was arguably a bit of a stretch, but I wanted to see if the students could write out the rhythm for at least the first two lines of Seasons. Starting with the first line, I had the students clap 4 times and then say/sing the line while continuing to clap. I then asked them what syllables were being spoken when clapping. This took a lot longer for them to get correctly than I expected, and I had to have the students clap and sing a few times more. I then simply wrote out vertical lines for each syllable, but with the one on the offbeat ("is") with a different color, and I asked the students what we should do with that one - e.g. how to fit two notes in the space of one ta. With 1 ta, 2 ti's, and a set of tikitiki's written out on the side, students were able to choose the pair of ti's for the rhythm of that 3rd beat. I feel in retrospect that I didn't explain the concept of the time of 1 ta or 1 beat very well, and that really made things complicated as we moved to the next line. Getting the students to pick out the clapped syllables too a bit of an extra effort, and then I sectioned away each set of syllables into beats on the board. Choosing a rhythm for the 2nd and 4th beat ("falling") was easy, but then choosing a rhythm for the other two beats I realized was going to be way over their heads. One student did sort of go down the path of realizing that something had to be mixed up (from the list of ta/ti/tiki) in order to fit 3 syllables into one beat's worth of time, but they couldn't figure out how. I also asked a student to describe what syllables (e.g. in "hear the rain") was faster, and that student couldn't come up with the right answer. I'll have to figure out a better way to explain how to fill rhythms up in a different way. I've already got some ideas; check in next week. :) We ended this exercise by singing... | |
| Seasons | Review, practice round, record/playback round |
| After a very quick review (e.g. "sing with me") I simply built on what I did last week, except this time, I had the students split into 4 groups! (The class was an even 24 kids today, which was nice.) I first cycled through the class, with each group just singing the first line. Then, we tried the ever-so-famous 4-way round. Not so good the first time - it seemed like the groups lost momentum after singing the first line, and so I had to remind them to keep singing (and in fact, I found myself reminding them after each iteration). I had the groups start in clockwise order with the group closest to me, and perhaps that made it harder for the 2nd and 3rd groups (which were in the back of the class) to keep going, and so perhaps next time I'll arrange the class a little differently. After several practices, we tried recording - which also led to a few students just blaring so that they could be heard. (One student even shouted something before the song started, which led to a quick bench alert and a seat outside the music room.) It took about 3 recordings before I think I had something that had an even volume throughout the song, even though it was kind of quiet. I also didn't have the laptop positioned ideally for recording, and so that could have led to a quiet recording. However, it was loud enough to allow the students to (1) hear each group starting, and (2) recognize that at any point in the song, someone's singing "Hey, ho...". I noticed that I've started giving a deliberate starting tone (high C) for the students for Seasons. I tried confirming this w/ the piano, and similar to other people who are old and have perfect pitch, I found myself just ever so slightly flat. Boo. | |
| We Shall Not Be Moved | Review, sing again |
| I didn't have a lot of time, but I wanted to spend just a few minutes. Plus, the students were asking throughout the class to sing it again. (Yay!) After singing it once through, I asked the students again why I had the 1st and 3rd lines in red, and no one really could characterize what we did with those lines the last time. I wanted this time around to have the students respond during the 3rd line whatever I sang during the 1st line - sort of a delayed echo due to the static 2nd line; in order to illustrate this, I replaced the red words with just big orange circles, and that clicked in a bit better with the students. The students were able to pull off the delayed echo well. We sang it with a few of the same stanzas that we used the previous week, and I had the students line up to march out by singing as the last stanza "Line up everybody". It's always fun when I can incorporate a march-out-the-door exit while singing. Even after the song was done, I still heard students singing on their way back out to their regular classroom. | |
I still didn't get back to the Solfege scale, and I hope to do that next week with class #2, which should allow class #1 to catch up. My hope is that if the students remember notes, remember relative placement of pitches on a staff, and can write rhythms, that they'll be able to put it all together and start writing music - at least for songs that they definitely know. Sounds optimistic, eh?
I spent a little bit of time coming up with backpocket songs and other things to do for the next several weeks. The list was enormous, but it included Tuwe Tuwe (another potental round), Sarasponda, Big Rock Candy Mountain (Red Grammer's version), Wimoweh (also RG's version), Jenny Jenkins, Oh My Goodness (Sweet Honey), Still Gotta Get Up, and Hole in the Bottom of the Sea. Maybe I'll get to a few before the spring break.
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