Teaching Notes, 20120517

It's official - we are going to have our first spring sing at the school, which will be part of the open house in June. I also wanted to go back to the music room since it sounded like the construction outside was less noisy than it has been recently. Unfortunately, the noise was just as loud, and so it was a bit of a challenge to get the students to pay attention, particularly the first class students.

You'll Sing A Song	Warmup, change pitch
You'll Sing A Song is one of the songs that I'd like to have the students perform at the open house. In the past, we've covered the song in four languages - English, Spanish, French, and Mandarin, and my hope is to also add a bit of modulation in between languages. Thus, after we sang the song twice through, I had the students sing it just a little bit higher, and they did (for the most part). I didn't have printed out the other languages, so I couldn't really review the song in anything but English, but no matter, I'll do this song again next week with preprinted sheets.
Hello My Friends	Review song, add Spanish
Now that we were back in the music room, I took the time to return to Hello My Friends. The lyric sheets in different languages were still up on the wall, and so I had the students quickly sing through them (although I skipped one or two of them for the 2nd class in order to save time). I then introduced the lyrics in Spanish on a sheet of paper and put it on the wall. With many of the students in the class native Spanish speakers, it was easy for them to read (and they also noted that I had printed "mi amigos" instead of "mis amigos"), and so we sang right through it. I had to re-teach the coda again, and then we finished off the song.
Cho-co-la-te	Review chant, try a few other things
Since we were back in the music room, I re-laid tape down on the carpet for the students to sit on. I also made sure this time to have 4 different colors of tape - blue/white for the front line, and red/green for the back line. With the Cho-co-la-te chart on the board, we first reviewed the chant, then splitting the class in two, then in four. I also split the class such that the students sitting on the green line quadrant chanted the 4th beat, while everyone else chanted the other three beats. The chart had words written in three colors: blue (primary beat), red (2nd half of the beat), and green (the 4th beat for the first 4 measures). I was curious whether or not the students would be able to do the chant while splitting beats. So, I called up two students who typically paid more attention, and I had one say "U", while the other say "no", followed by "dos, tres" by the first student, finished off with "Cho!" by the 2nd. It was an interesting exercise, but not one that I really could spend extended time on.
Do Re Mi	Add new parts, review song
The students know Do Re Mi well, but I also spent some time listening to a recording from The Sound of Music, trying to get ideas. I picked up the Sol-Do-La-Fa-Mi-Do-Re sequence, which I had the stduents try singing. For the first class, I had the students talk, then sing in piecemeal the sequence, but I found that the students got bored of this quickly, making it difficult to teach. For the second class, with the sequence on the board, I simply sang it, and asked the students to repeat me, and they did! (I should have given the first class more credit in what they could do.) In both classes, we sang through the song quickly, but with the success of the sequence in the 2nd class, I also taught them the second sequence (Do Mi MI, Mi Sol Sol, Fa Re Re, La Ti Ti), and they sang it too. Neat.
Rattling Can	Dive into song
Rattling Can was so quickly successful in past classes that I felt it would be very easy to do for the Open House. I brought out the can, and the kids starting singing along automatically. Part of this exercise was to reconfirm that the students felt good about the song, and part was to figure out what items to sing about as we got later into the song. Based on interest and verbal rhythms, it sounded like words like "molecules" and "oxygen", while familiar to the students, were a mouthful. However, after introducing "quarks", the students were very interested in singing about something that quarks were made of, and so someone suggested "Q's" - cute, but it works!

I really was hoping for more, especially out of the first class, given that we were back in the music room, but with the outside noise, perhaps that was too much to ask for. As for the spring sing, I'm likely going to settle on You'll Sing A Song, Rattling Can, Do Re Mi, and possibly Teaching Peace. It's a lot to sing, and we only have two classes to pull it together, but I'm thinking it's doable.