Teaching Notes, 2nd, 20130411

This was the first week after returning from break, and looking back, thanks to a week of minimum days and a field trip, it had been 6 weeks since the students' last music class, which definitely seems like a long long time. It's too bad during those minimum day weeks that there isn't some way to inject a music class in the morning just for that week.

There were two things I wanted to cover today - tempo and a review of Oh My Goodness for the Spring Sing. The Spring Sing is definiitely on, and I'm also still looking for that 2nd song or activity. We also were going to have class in the empty room near my students' regular classrooms, and so I thought it was safe to bring in a variety of instruments for the students to play.

Well Enough Said	Lead students into class, introduce instruments, explore tempo
Before I had the students walk in, I told them that I would be giving some, but not all, of the students something, and they could use it in a way that would "fit" the music that they'd be listening to. I didn't elaborate beyond that, and so as the students came in, I had a variety of instruments to pass out - cymbals (hand and finger sized), triangles, shakers, tambourines. The room that we were having class in isn't huge, and so I still wanted to limit the sound (noise) that the class would be able to generate; thus, I had enough to give every other student an instrument. In the background, Well Enough Said was playing, and after everyone was in the room, I tried to encourage the students to keep a beat with a tambourine that I had on my own. By this time, there wasn't a lot of time left in the song (the song is barely one and a half minutes), and so I then led the students to follow my beat, 8 beats/2 bars at a time. Each time, I counted off, and the students mostly followed; by the 3rd try, just about everyone with an instrument was playing with me so that you could finally hear spacing in between the beats. Just like in previous classes, even though I had asked the students to walk in a circle, by the time everyone was in the room, the students were in a bit of a glob. I had to get the students to reconstitute a circle after the song had ended. This was the first time the students had access to lots of different instruments, and so we spent some time examining the different instruments, one instrument type at a time. I had students who had, for instance, tambourines, show the class how they would play it. I then suggested that for nearly all instruments, including these, there was more than one proper way to play it. You could continuously shake a tambourine instead of beat it; you could do cymbal circles instead of crashes, etc. When we go to the triangles, I also pointed out the importance of holding the triangles from the dangling handle rather than holding the metal, and we talked about the reasons. (That also allowed me to review with the students about the correlation between vibration/motion and sound.) Back to playing on beat - I had been counting off to four each time, and so I then asked why they thought I was doing that. Some students thought that it told the students when to start, which is correct, but it wasn't quite what I was looking for. Eventually someone suggested that the counting told them how fast I wanted them to play - yay - and so then I introduced (or re-introduced, for some) the term "tempo". I then said, I'd teach them all some Italian, and we covered the terms (in this order) Andante, Allegro, Presto, Largo. I usually do tempo terms in this way, starting in the middle or with one of the terms that one can relate to (e.g. Andante/walking pace). Next, I counted off at a moderately fast pace; the students played 8 beats, and I then asked them what tempo they thought it was. Before continuing, I had the students who had instruments give their instruments to someone else. (Invariably, one or two students got to hang onto their instrument, which got some other students grumpy.) We continued with various tempos with the new instrument-wielding students, and each time I tried to take a poll as to what tempo the students felt they were playing. When I felt the students had enough, I then had the students put the instruments back in a bin that I held as I walked around the room. I then started to sing the chorus to Oh My Goodness as I collected the instruments. In the second class, I tried this with a student, but she walked too slowly, and I had to sing the chorus twice.
Oh My Goodness	Review Song, sing entire song
Before the class started, I struggled but eventually succeeded in getting the overhead projection system to work, which was essential since I had the words to the chorus and each stanza printed out. I wanted to cover the *entire* song, and that was impossible to do if I had to write everything on the board. After I had sung the chorus (and many of the children followed me singing), I asked the students what part of the song that was - many shouted out "chorus", and so I followed up with asking them what came next. Once someone shouted out "stanza", I then displayed the first stanza overhead, and we sang it together. Plenty of students remember how the stanza roughly went, and so it was an easy sing. At the end of the stanza, I again asked what came next, and the students responded with singing the chorus. We proceeded to cover stanza after chorus after stanza. By the 4th chorus, I didn't display the lyrics again, and there wasn't much drop off; I remarked to them that they didn't need it anymore. (Well, some might have benefited from them; I'll bring them again next week.) Parts of the stanza aren't really sung in the original recording, but I kept the students singing the standard tune to all stanzas. At the end, when the chorus words change ("Oh my goodness, look at me…"), I definitely had to show them the ending words. They sang through that chorus once, and I then wrote in a repeat symbol (||: :||), and I had the students repeat the chorus one more time. Yay! The students are definitely enjoying the song. It's a little different from anything else I've taught - I've been explicitly teaching the song without doing a lot of other general music instruction with the song; we're learning the song just to learn the song. However, I think the students are having a lot of fun with the words.
Tempo Game	Have students explore tempos of various songs
I wasn't sure if I really was going to have another opportunity to spend time focusing on tempo explicitly in a later class this year (it will for sure come up anecdotally), I wanted to play a little game of Tempo 4 corners. I hung the four tempo words (each printed on a piece of paper) in different corners of the room. I then had the students walk to a particular corner that matched the tempo of the song I played. I tried to choose music that the students heard in past classes: Raisins/Barenaked Ladies, Syncopated Cyril/Shenanigans, Skaters' Waltz, etc. I wanted to illustrate that tempo was also subjective, and for the most part (except for Skaters' Waltz), we didn't have a unanimous opinion on tempo. Just to play with their brains a little bit, I told the students while the Skaters' Waltz was slow, if you were to clap it in 3, then it's actually faster than they thought. I ended the exercise with instructing the students to line up in front of the sign that matched the next song. I then played Sunshine and Lollipops/Lesley Gore. I had purposely put the "Presto!" sign by the door to exit, and so the students all lined up quickly by that sign, ready to leave. Incidentally, Sunshine and Lollipops, even though it's a song form the 60s, was also featured in the kid movie Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, and so it always works well as a fast song.

Well, that was it. We covered tempo, and I reviewed Oh My Goodness. But there was a *lot* of things I didn't get to. For instance, I wanted to explore Well Enough Said's lyrics a bit, including adding "Still gotta get up in the morning" as a followup response to the "Well Enough Said" interjection that I use. WES also has an interesting bridge that involves some overlapping call-and-answer, whose lyrics I actually had prewritten on the board. I am also still looking for that 2nd song, which might be Tuwe Tuwe (if I can pull off a round).

There were other things that I still left abandoned from my original plan, but rather than spoil the surprise, you'll just have to come back in 2 weeks and see what I chose. :)