Teaching Notes, 20120607

We had only two more classes left, and now that the spring sing was over, it was time to cover some last bits that I wanted to try out.

Rainforest chant (Sweet Honey In the Rock)	Teach chant sequence
In May, I had brought my family to watch a live performance of Sweet Honey In The Rock, and while that particular show didn't have a lot of material that would be appropriate for class, one song did - a rainforest chant that could be sung in a pseudo-round. It is merely two lines of melody, but during the performance, the group had split the audience into four parts, and with a tight round (only one beat separating each group), we all sang together and produced a piercing yet mesmerizing echo that was supposed to resemble what one might hear in the rainforest. To start the class, I had the students simply try singing the sequence with me. I'd work with this again later.
Seasons (Summer version)	Revisit song, try a round/td>
It was almost summer, and we already had some days that felt like summer, so I had the students sing the summer version of the song. (Students reminded me that we never covered Spring - I thought we had, but it didn't matter.) Learning the song was really easy, because if you know the notes to sing, you can sing most anything. (Hardee har har.) So, I quickly split the group into two halves, and we sang it in a mini-round. For the first class, I split the class even further into 4 groups, and it sounded ok, but not great; it was very difficult to keep the groups singing at the same tempo, no matter how wildly I was gesturing. For the second class, rather than splitting into 4, I had the two halves repeating the song over and over again (probably enough for each side to sing three times), and it worked out pretty well once the students figured out to eliminate the break between iterations. I recorded and played back both classes' recordings, and for the second class, I asked the students to listen to when "Hey Ho Summer's Here" was sung (which was pretty much all the time after the first two lines). Most students were shocked, and I had to visually illustrate why.
Rainforest Chant (1st class)	Revisit chant, record/td>
I had the students practice the chant a few more times, and I recorded their voices during this time, enough for at least 5 or 6 repetitions. After the recording, I carved out 4 repetitions of the chant, and I played back part of it. Using the Audacity tool, I tried overlaying a copy of the chant so that they were staggered one beat after the other. Unfortunately, because one has to work with only the amplitude/volume of the recording snippets in Audacity (as I didn't want the students to hear me work with the snippet copies), I ended up overlaying them initially so that they were about a half beat offset, which sounds a bit like heavy industrial echoing. I fixed the staggers and played back the product to the students, and only a few students could hear the repeating Ama-EE echo sounding like a rainforest. Given that the 1st class didn't really get a lot out of this exercise, I deferred trying this with the second class until the following week.
Wimoweh (Red Grammer, 1st class)	Teach sequence/td>
I wanted to experiment a little bit, given that this was the second to last class, and so I tried teaching Wimoweh, in the style that Red Grammer does in his recording. This involved teaching the word "Wimoweh", and 3 different sequences. Unfortunately, I found myself rushing a bit, and it didn't seem like the students were all that interested. I did manage to get them mostly to sing the 3 parts, but when I tried to get them to sing different parts together, the vast majority of those students who wanted to sing decided to sing whatever was newly added. I had the students practice the chant a few more times, and I recorded their voices during this time, enough for at least 5 or 6 repetitions. After the recording, I carved out 4 repetitions of the chant, and I played back part of it. Using the Audacity tool, I tried overlaying a copy of the chant so that they were staggered one beat after the other. Unfortunately, because one has to work with only the amplitude/volume of the recording snippets in Audacity (as I didn't want the students to hear me work with the snippet copies), I ended up overlaying them initially so that they were about a half beat offset, which sounds a bit like heavy industrial echoing. I fixed the staggers and played back the product to the students, and only a few students could hear the repeating Ama-EE echo sounding like a rainforest. Given that the 1st class didn't really get a lot out of this exercise, I deferred trying this with the second class until the following week.
Yesh Tanu Laish (2nd class)	Teach dance outside/td>
Also in keeping with the theme of experimentation, for the second class I took the students outside and tried to teach them a simple dance to Yesh. I split the class into two, lining them up into two lines. I had the two leaders go down the middle, with one leader trying to mimc the other. When the leaders returned to the top of their lines, they led each of their respective lines to do the "peeling of the banana", which eventually leads to new line leaders. A few things - it was a bit of a challenge to keep the two lines of students as lines, and spread apart enough to give the line leaders a path down and back in between. Peeling the banana always also led to a lot of chaos, with students ending up in a different order. Things got chaotic enough that I or the teacher were pulling people out of the lines. In the future, I think it might be more successful starting with a subset of the students, and then adding more who want to participate. I did also make a slower version of the song, and I thought that was most helpful - it was about 15% slower, about 3 minutes of song. The students had a difficult enough time trying to move around and keeping the song segmented in 8-bar sections, that I don't thnk we could have completed the song using a faster recording.

In all, it was a mixed bag of results, but I think it was on average reasonably successful. I intend on switching what we cover between the two grades so that, for instance, everyone would have had an opportunity to do the Yesh dance.