| Well Enough Said | Lead class into the room, review bridge |
| I wanted to lead the class while playing Sweet Honey's version of the song, which is pretty fast, and so initially I had the students try to alternate steps and claps. For neither class was this mini-exercise terribly successful, so I led the students into class while listening to the song. Similar to past classes, I had the students walk in all the way, and then I led the front of the class towards the back of the rows and across the width of the room again. (In the 2nd class, I remembered to remove one of the lines.) I had prewritten the bridge on the board again, and when the recording hit the bridge, I motioned to the class to read and follow if they could, and some did try, even though the recording is actually on the fast side for the students. After the song ended, we spent time reviewing the bridge, and we practiced it a few times before singing it again to the recording at full speed. Now, the second class, despite being short on time due to a major assembly scheduled right after class, actually seemed to be really getting into the song, and so I spent nearly the entire remaining time working on this bridge. We did stop to discuss the word choice ("it don't matter") of the song along with trying to sing the middle lines as a call-and-answer effect. We even got to review the repeat symbol (in both classes) as I wrote the last 3 sung lines on two lines. Anyhow, the second class seemed perfectly happy practicing the bridge over and over until we got it close to the speed of the recording, and I'd have to say, they sounded pretty good! | |
| Somewhere Over The Rainbow | Examine pitch/rhythm for the 1st line, write notes on bars! |
| For the first class, I walked through the first two lines of SoTR and I had the class recreate the pitch graph while asking them to sing internally the notes of the lines. For the second class, we talked quickly about rhythm, and we created rhythms only for the 1st, 3rd, and 4th measures, mostly for simplicity and mostly because there was so little time. For the 2nd class, I also spent a little bit of time introducing the half note, which they had not seen yet in class. In both classes, I then talked rather quickly about uniting rhythm and pitch. For the first class, I reviewed the half note, and for the 1st measure, I wrote out two half notes, each reflecting the two notes (higher, than lower). In the second class, I reviewed the relative pitches of the notes, and again I wrote out the 1st measure using half notes. Then, in both classes, I overlayed five horizontal staff lines, and revealed to the class how notes are written on a staff. I'm not so sure how well that stuck, and so I'm sure I'll try to sneak in staff writing again. | |
| Violin introduction | Introduce the violin |
| In the very little time that I had, I introduced the violin to both classes, first by talking about how ukuleles and guitars were played. In past years, I've talked about violins and compared them to electric violins, but I didn't get a chance to even do that. My intention was to play some violin music for them this week, and for next week, teach the irish jig, but I didn't even play for them the music. However, I did get to spend a little bit of time talking about the violin and the role of the bow. | |
I'm partially set for next week; I'll definitely be talking more about the violin, the electric violin, and with some luck I'll even get the students in both classes to dance the irish jig.
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