| Teaching Peace | Lead class into the room, while singing, reintroduce lyrics, add partial echo. |
| As I've done before, I led the students while singing this song, but at first I tried singing it at the regular pitch - and again, it was too low for the students (and few tried doing an octave match). As a result, I then switched over to singing it in C instead of in G, which was better for the students and did not require octave matching. I had the lyrics for the chorus on the board, and underneath, I had the parts of the stanza that the students would echo underneath. My intention was to have the students do a partial echo, (e.g. "it's up to us/to show we care/everywhere"), similar to how Red Grammer wanted his audience to respond when he sang this song. It actually worked pretty well, although I had to emphasize the 3rd and 7th lines where, well, the students didn't sing anything. It was time to reintroduce the terms "chorus" and "stanza". We talked a little bit more about musical forms, and how we kept going back to the chorus of this song. We also chatted how other songs did something similar (Hello World was an obvious example). | |
| Sticking Rhythms | Have the class repeat me on sticks, then stick to written rhythms on the board |
| Rather than try to pass out sticks to everyone, this time I passed out sticks to every other kid. I was hoping that this way there would be less inadvertent sticking, and students would pay closer attention so that they'd eventually get a stick. I think it mildly worked, but it certainly meant less time spent passing out sticks. I sang Everybody Oughta Know a few times when passing the sticks out. Those without sticks were asked to clap (and I did tell them that everyone would get a chance to stick eventually.) I then had the students repeat a one-beat pattern that I was doing. With only one beat, there wasn't a whole lot of variation: quarter, two eighths, eighth + two sixteenths, two sixteenths + eighth, four sixteenths. It turns out that the eighth + two sixteenths is harder than two sixteenths + eighth, but in retrospect that shouldn't have surprised me so much since the latter sounds like 3 even quick hits. My goal here was to have the students come in at tempo, without needing prompting other than my sticking, and without coming in too early or too late. Probably the hardest was to play four sixteenth notes without running over with a 5th (or more) hit. Originally, was thinking of extending to a two measure echo, but I didn't think I would have enough time. Next, I wrote four of the patterns on the board - all but the eighth + two sixteenths beat. I then had the students repeat my sticking of each beat again, and then, we did it all in one shot. Afterwards, I had the students with sticks pass them to students who didn't have them. We then proceeded to substitute some beats with different patterns, and eventually one of the measures was replaced with the eighth + two sixteenths, and that was truly difficult for the students to master. We practiced this a few more times before moving onto the next activity. | |
| Oh My Goodness, Look At This Mess | Re-introduce song, teach lyrics |
| I had prewritten the chorus of Oh My Goodness on the board, and I tried to teach the students the song by line by line repetition. Some had clearly recalled hearing the song before from a past class, and so the students as a whole seemed like they picked up the song pretty well. We sang through it a few times, and then I sang a stanza of the song (not written on the board); after the stanza, I pointed back to the board and we all sang the chorus. During the next stanza, I started collecting the sticks (which I purposefully left out so that the students could witness the cleanup of a "mess"), and eventually we all sang the chorus again. As the students were lining up to exit, I then asked the students if they recalled the part of a song that is sung over and over again, hoping that they'd recall the terms "chorus" and "stanza" - it didn't quite stick as well as I had liked, but at least the students seemed to enjoy the song. So, I'm sure I'll be using that same song again. | |
The students seemed to really like Oh My Goodness - far more than the last time I tried singing the song. If there was time, I was ready to re-release The Longer The Faster, and Tuwe Tuwe - I'll definitely use them again when we start up school again.
