Teaching Notes, 20110504

Today was May 4th, which meant that this class was the closest class to Cinco de Mayo. As such, I wanted to teach at least one more dance, and that meant holding the class in the gym again.

Bonanopstekker	Lead students directly into the song and do the dance prescribed in the Shenanigans CD
I purposefully didn't give a lot of time for the students to get settled, and so I led them straight into the dance. Enough students remembered so that those who didn't had plenty of examples. I still had to prompt students before each transition, and we used basically a simplified dance similar to what we did a few weeks ago. The dance went ok, although there were more collisions than we had before. For both classes, I took some time to have the students think of aspects of the activity that "worked" or "didn't work", and most realized that the colliding/tripping/crashing wasn't all that much fun. The Bonanopstekker, danced without holding hands (which we did) does force students to be more aware of the their surroundings, and so I hope that that awareness stays with them for a while.
El Juego Chirimbolo	Teach the song, then teach the dance
I talked a little bit about Cinco de Mayo for a little bit, and then I proceeded to teach the song to the students. It's a pretty simple song, and fortunately the lyrics, which are in Spanish, were mostly understandable to the students, despite my poor Spanish accent. I then started teaching the dance. I taught by singing the song with me moving the appropriate body part to the song. After another repetition, most of the class was following me. I then had the students try walking while doing the movements, which actually is a lot harder than one thinks, as the students were asked to walk sideways (and without partners). I then added the twirl to close off the dance. Next, I chose a student, and we both did the movements together. The dance typically has partners hold hands, but I didn't ask the students to do that through most of the dance since they tended to be very squeamish about holding hands. When it came to the twirl, I had to have the students hold hands, as otherwise, the double twirl doesn't quite work. The students seemed to get the dance after a few repetitions. The twirl ending was something that I wanted the students to add when I gave a particular hand signal (hand way up in the air), and so the students had to wait for it. Also adding to the fun - I had the students walk in the opposite direction after each iteration so that the students didn't crash into one side of the room. I was able to get most of the students into the dance from the first class, and for the second class, we made one massive double line of students spanning the length of the gym. Most students in the dance were able to do the twirl so long as the twirl was facing the original direction of motion, but if the twirl was towards the opposite direction, a lot of the students got tripped up. I had a chance to talk about why the twirl worked better in a certain direction with the second class, and it was a pretty good talk.
Epo I Tai Tai E	Try it a few times and see if the students can figure out the pattern
This is always a fun exercise, and it took an unexpectedly higher number of iterations before students really caught on. I had to give hints about how the last measure of the song was already determined by the earlier parts. Once the students figured out the pattern, I switched the motions on them, and even then it took a few iterations before the students could figure out the next version.

I was pretty happy with this second stint in the gym, and perhaps I can squeeze in one last class in the gym. I did want to try Thady You Gander and the Irish Jig once again, not to mention How Do You Dootee.

Teaching Notes, 20110420

And now, we're back! It's been 3 weeks since I last taught, and I was ready to get back into teaching. During the last scheduled class, my first class cancelled its music class for that week, and so I felt I'd be ok redoing a lot of what I did during that week, and effectively do a review for the 2nd class. That turned out to be just fine, as many of the 2nd class students were quite happy to cover material that we covered nearly a month ago.

I also wanted to do some more rhythms in parts, and so I had the students walk in deliberately into four even (as much as possible) lines parallel to the front board.

Teaching Peace	Reintroduce song, lyrics and partial echo. Reintroduce chorus and stanza terms.
I wrote the lyrics to the chorus on the board, and I wrote the stanza in partial echo using elipses; e.g.: …take my hand …come along … … …brand new song etc. I wanted to get the students to become used to trying to sing just their part regardless of what I was singing. In this case, they were almost echoing everything that I was singing except for that 3rd line, which made things a bit easier than if they were singing something totally different. We practiced singing this way a few times before I tried it using the chorus as a lead-in. It took just a little bit of extra practice, but eventually both classes got it. I revisited the terms "chorus" and "stanza", but it seemed like few students really understood what those terms meant. For the second class, I took this a little farther. The last line of the stanza normally has no echo whatsoever (and I noted this on the board), but instead, I had the students chant "1, 2, 3, 4" during the last full measure of the stanza. Now, that took a lot of extra work, and I had to time my gesturing to them when to come in. Only perhaps 2 or 3 students could come in without my prompting. Also, for the second class, I tried throwing in the 2nd stanza without rehearsing it with the class (or having the lyrics written on the board). It was actually working really well until I couldn't remember the "sing out loud" line correctly; I sang "sing out high, sing out loud", which sort of left me high and dry (and rather embarrased).
Clapping Rhythms	Have the class clap rhythms printed on paper.
I had typed out 8 sheets of single-measure rhythms and taped them on one side of the room: QRQR eeeeQR QQQR QreQR QRQQ RQRQ eereQR QRRQ Q = quarter note, e= eighth note, R= quarter rest, r = eighth rest I had the students sitting in 4 rows, and I had the students face the sheets so that I had two sheets assigned to each group. I then had the class practice each of the rhythms one at a time. I didn't have a lot of time, so I sort of drill-seargeanted the patterns one at a time. I found that patterns #4, 6 and 7 were more difficult than others for the students to get, and I had to illustrate them a few extra times for the students. Next, I had students clap the patterns that were assigned to each line. Effectively, that was two measures per line. However, for the second class, I found that they weren't picking up the patterns quickly enough, and so I reduced their assignment to one measure per group, and I used measures #1, 2, 3, and 8. We were able to run through the cascading patterns a few times. I then showed the students the tone bells, and I played for them the 8 patterns, one pitch per measure, up the scale. The students started clapping when I finished, which surprised me a bit. I do hope to introduce the bells to them more formally at a later date.

For the second class, I did have the students sing the chorus of Oh My Goodness (which I had written on the board) one time before they exited. The first class exited quickly after the tone bell demo.