Teaching Notes, 20110209

The school is actually sending a small troupe of students to the SF Chinese New Year parade, but that event isn't scheduled for nearly another two weeks, and so I wanted to keep having some element of the class relevant to CNY. At the same time, I wanted to sing another song that perhaps should be part of their repertoire at some point.

Somewhere Over the Rainbow	Teach class first two stanzas after entering class
Just about every week, I had the students sing/chant/step to something as they came in, and oftentimes the singing or chanting was never terribly effective, as students were more focused on entering the room and finding a place to sit. This time, I decided to just lead the students to their seats while just strumming the tune to Over the Rainbow on my ukulele. One or two students I think sort of knew what I was playing, but most didn't recognize the strumming quite yet. I billed the song to the students as something that most of them have probably heard at some point, and so then I then just sang the two stanzas to them while playing ukulele. I then proceeded to teach the song to them by echo, line by line. I had the lyrics already written on the board so that they could focus more on the music. "Somewhere" actually spans an octave, and so I spent an bit of extra time just trying to get the students used to the interval. We also reviewed the word "octave" and its significance. It's worth noting here that at the start of the year, most of the students wouldn't have been able to sing an octave interval, and now, they were all able to do the jump after I sang it for them. After we sang through the song's first two stanzas twice, I asked again who recognized the song, and fewer than half of the students said that they recognized the song, although that was more than the original one or two students who said so before we started singing as a group.
Rhythm Practice	Practice Rhythms found in Lion Dances
I wanted to revisit the same rhythm practice that I did (albeit rushed) last week with the 1st class, and so this was largely a repeat of that same exercise, with the same progression. This time, I spent more time trying to get the class repeating what I was doing, especially during the easier rhythms so that I knew I had everyone's attention. In particular, the first half of the rhythms all have a rest on the 4th beat, and I emphasized trying to get the students to do nothing during that 4th beat - which was surprisingly difficult! (I did allow them to count verbally '4'.) It seemed to help when I reminded the students about the 3-step walk that we did for the GongXi Ni march.' I also made sure to illustrate the rhythms using Kodaly markings on the board; to introduce the "next" rhythm, I simply added another vertical line and adjusted the horizontal lines as necessary. When we finished the 4th rhythm (before the addition of the sixteenth notes), I then passed out rhythm sticks, and we started to do the same rhythm list from the top, until again we finished that same 4th line. (I whipped out Everybody Oughta Know while passing out the sticks - the response rate was probably about 50%.) Then, I had them drum on the ground instead of tapping the sticks in the air, and that was a ton of fun for the children. (All kids like to drum.) I did have to make sure that the children had sufficient room in front of each other so that they wouldn't be rapping sticks on each others' backs. With the kids now drumming on the ground, I was able to then move to the fabled 5th lines, with the sixteenth notes! This is as far as I got with the 2nd class, but with the 1st class, I was able to get through until the 8th line (before adding a second set of sixteenth notes). I was sort of rushing the additions at the end of the 1st class, but I wanted to get to to a point where they could play continuously; when they tried, well, it sounded ok but quickly morphed into mud. I finished the day with the 2nd class with a quick singing of We Shall Not Be Moved, which left the kids quite happy.

I thought both classes did pretty well with the sticking and rhythms; near the end of each exercise, I had most of the students paying attention, and just about everyone was heeding the 4th beat rest (when we had it). If the children continue to respond well to the sticks, then I'll just keep introducing more and more with them.

My hope with Over The Rainbow was to provide another example of a song that can be sung in different ways; I'll be playing for them the Iz version soon.