Teaching Notes, 20110518

This week, I really wanted to try Tuwe Tuwe one last time and see if would stick with the students. At the same time, I did want to revisit the tone bells, but I also had a new song ready for them that I thought might be a nice departure from the planned aspects of a music class.

Tuwe Tuwe	Lead students into class while singing, attempt staggered parts
This time, I sort of forced the issue of bringing students in while singing (or not singing), and Tuwe Tuwe, being so short, I figured, would be doable. While many students obliged by singing, students felt more comfortable doing a line by line echo than singing with me, which made the middle verses ("A brofra ba…") difficult to repeat due to their lengths. After the students had all entered the class, I had to spend some time reviewing the song to make sure that they could sing it well. In retrospect, I should have ended right there rather than attempt the next thing I tried… recording and re-recording! I first recorded the students sing Tuwe Tuwe, with a silent count. (Getting the silent count wasn't too difficult for the students, and it really allowed me to capture the attention of the students.) Recording was easy (despite the substandard microphone that I have), but it turned out that playback at the right volume was very difficult! My goal here was to have the students sing while being accompanied by their own recording. However, the students would start two bars behind the recording. I tried recording each class more than once,and I didn't get a good balance of the playback recording and the new voices; usually the second voice would drown out the first. Part of the reason may be the distance between the sound source/boombox and the placement of the microphone. Plus, the addition of the second voice seems to max out the amplitude of the recording, and as a result the recording gets a little clipped. A couple of ideas for the next time I try this - record the original recording for more than 1 iteration. That way the students when singing the second recording can hear the overlap for longer. The other thing that I might try is to record the song for more than iteration and then use Audacity to overlay voices in a staggered form. This eliminates the need to record a second time, but it does require some quick work on the laptop in the middle of class, and that might lead to some fidgeting by the students.
Tone Bells	Revisit the tone bells
Tuwe Tuwe took a lot longer to do, and so I had only a few moments to work with the tone bells with the students. I ended up showing them the full set of tone bells, with which we talked about things like the Do-Re-Mi scale (using C->C), and octaves. People asked about the black tone bells, and so that gave me the opportunity to talk about "the notes in-between"; for the second class, I even had the class vocalize an ascending "whoop", and I asked them how many notes did they sing.
The Rattlin' Can (Key Wilde and Mr. Clarke)	Teach song w/ props
A few weeks ago, I purchased a new car with sattelite radio, and one of the stations is a kids' music station. Naturally, I've been using it for ideas, and one of the songs that I've fished out of the playlist is "The Rattlin' Can", which is a variation of the Rattlin' Bog, however, using things that are a little easier to visualize: a can, a box, a bag, a bottle, some juice, some bubbles, etc. I brought in a blank paint can purchased from the local Kelly Moore store, put inside a small cardboard box (which I had to construct a bit), and inside that, I put in a red newspaper bag holding a small 6-oz bottle of juice. This was a very instrumental (no pun intended) prop in getting the students to sing the right things. I first had the students practice the chorus a few times; naturally, they didn't know what the full song was going to sound like, so the students were lukewarm in singing at this point. I then introduced the can to the class, and I started singing the first stanza, followed by the chorus. Some students tried to echo, but I didn't really give them the time. (I also didn't have the time for them to echo.) Opening the can, I took out the box (to a lot of ooohs), and then I sang about the box, and the box in the can, followed by the chorus. By the time I got to the bag, many of the students got used to the cascading lead-in to the chorus. I had also placed the box and can onto chairs facing the students to help them remember what was inside. This proceeded with the bottle, juice, and bubbles (I shook the juice so that students could see bubbles inside), and by this time, the students got the cascading chorus that all I had to do was point to the object and sing only bits of the cascade. The song actually goes as far as breaking down the bubbles into atoms, protons and quarks, but I didn't really go that far. Instead, when it was time to break the bubbles down, I simply asked the class what the bubbles were made of, and we used "air" or "oxygen", which worked perfectly well. This song was a wild hit.

Like last week, I really wanted to do more with the bells, and so I'll have to make a concerted effort to work with them in the next class. I did, just in case, have the Hole in the Bottom of the Sea (Red Grammer, another cascading song), along with Epo I Tai Tai E if necessary, and How Do You Dootee.