This year's schedule is going to be similar to last years' schedule, in the sense that I am co-teaching with another volunteer docent, and for the majority of the year, we will be alternating weeks. However, for the first week, both of us co-taught the first class. We roughly broke the class so that the other docent started, while I finished, and I'll talk about the entire day's activities.
Also a little unusual for teaching two classes this year, we have a break in the middle. The first class is right before morning recess, while the second class is after morning recess. That obviously leaves a lot of time to re-prepare class. It also meant that for the second class, the students could line up and march in. In addition, both classes are in the same classroom, which certainly should make set-up a lot easier.
| Hello My Friends | Sing Hello [name] to each of the kids, and encourage the students to sing along |
| We wanted to be able to welcome the students to their first music class and also get familiarized with their names. In order for this to work, I had prepared name tags (on lanyards) for all of the kids. However, distributing them, even with another parent helper in the room, was quite challenging, and we consumed about 3-4 minutes just handing them out at the start of each class. Not helping was the fact that many of the lanyards were tangled.
For the first class, with the lanyards distributed, we sang "Hello [name], hello", and filled in the name of each child. In some cases, we couldn't see the name tag, and so we had to ask the rest of the class to help us - that actually got some of the children to sing along and figure out what exactly what we were doing. During the second class, we had them march into the room, which actually took some work, as the students brought in their snack bags from recess and broke up the line when dropping off their bags. Anyhow, while students didn't all sing along, I think that most, if not all, at least had the general tune etched in their mind. That would be useful later on. | |
| Do Re Mi | Teach full-body solfeggi, immerse into song |
| To start off, we asked the students to help stretch out, and then we had the students follow us in body solfege, from a low Do to a high Do. Many of the students already knew the Solfege scale, although some just moved along. I didn't have a lot of expectation that the students would really follow in tune, as many Kindergarteners actually cannot sing a full octave with control, but that didn't matter much, as we just wanted the students to move, and to hear the solfege notes - especially if they were new to them. We did try to take the students back down the scale, but few actually sang with us at that point. We then broke into the Do Re Mi song (sung twice). The students sort of kept up a bit - many knew the song (even if they couldn't recite the 8 notes of the scale). Again, Do Re Mi is difficult for kindergarteners to match pitch, but at least most of them kept up. In the second class, we introduced "Piano" and "Forte", and we led the students while singing with the different volume levels. | |
| Head Shoulders Knees Toes | Immerse students into motions and song |
| HSKT is obviously a pretty classic song for kids, and even when we were just asking students to shout out what body part we were pointing to (e.g. Head), many of the students remarked that they knew some sort of song that involved those body parts. Great segue - we then jumped right into the song.
We actually ended up singing a variant of HSKT that I never heard before - one where after the 2nd line, "I know how to find my head, shoulders, knees and toes" is sung instead of "Eyes and ears and mouth and nose". It seemed to work, although it didn't seem like most of the students had heard that particular variation. | |
| Oats Peas Beans | Teach students to chant part of the song |
| I would end up teaching the remainder of the class. Taking a page straight out of the suggested Kinder lesson plan, I asked the students if they had a garden - of course lots of students raised their hands, and then I asked if any planted strawberries. I then had the students all sing out in sol-mi "I like strawberries", and then I sang-asked them (also in sol-mi) if they liked various other kinds of produce - blueberries, apples ("Who has an apple tree?"), peaches, green beans, peas, etc. I then asked "Who likes oatmeal?", and of course lots of students answered back. I then asked (without singing) how does one plant oatmeal in a garden. I expectedly received a lot of confused looks and giggles, and so I talked about oats, and how they grew in a way similar to wheat. I'm not sure if that made any ore sense for the children, except I think they understood that you grow oats from a plant, and yet you eat oatmeal, not straight oats.
I then had the students echo me in saying Oats, Peas, Beans. This grabbed the attention of the entire class pretty quickly, and it certainly helps that all of these words are monosyllabic. I proceeded to teach them a new word about another grain called "Barley", and it took a little more effort for the students to recite "Barley". After having the class echo me, word by word, the four foods, I then started chanting them one at a time without waiting for an echo, albeit very slowly. I also wanted the students to follow my arm/hand motions, and so I tried doing a little tap-clap-etc. motion to get the kids' arms moving as well. I realized during the first class that while you can do single motions to keep a beat, it helps to do a double-eighth rhythm for Barley. I wanted to then break into a chant of "Oats Peas Beans and Barley grow", and in order to do that, I had to (1) go back to a single beat rhythm, and (2) slow it down. I did have the students echo each of the four lines (while still keeping a beat with arms), and the students seemed to keep up ok. We then chanted together all 4 lines, after which I asked "do you know how these things grow?" Students would nearly unanimously say "I don't know" (or similar), and so we chanted again. I had the students chant one more time, after which I told them that next week perhaps we'd explore this a little more. | |
| Show Me | Teach students the response |
| I typically spend the first day of class doing a lot of little exercises to see what is most effective in capturing the students' attention, and Show Me is something that almost always works with Kinders. I first sang "Show Me", and then I had the students practice echoing me before advancing to the next phrase. I did this using the standard words (door/window/floor), and the kids seemed to be amused - some thought it was a game. | |
| I Like You | March to the song, insert actions |
| With the kids sitting on the mat, I wanted them to make a circle around the outside of the mat. For the first class, I asked the students to make a circle - I forgot that that's an evolving skill eventually learned in Kindergarten. So, I had groups of students move over to the outside of the mat. (For the second class, I gave clearer instructions about who moving to where.) I had the students all held hands (no squeamishness in Kindergarten!), and then I asked them if they knew which way was towards the right. I actually had little expectation that everyone would correctly identify the desired direction, so I walked around the inside of the circle, telling students which way they'd be going; it was important to make a lap around the circle so that two opposite ends knew they were going in opposite directions.
Part of this exercise was to get the students used to marching in a circle, and so I had the students practice taking a step to the right, on my vocal command. We took all deliberate, single steps initially, and after I got an easy rhythm going, I then had them march to a beat. I then started the song. After the first verse, I then told the students to watch me as we continued to march - I then sang "We can clap", of course, accented with a clap. I then proceeded to add jump, stomp and hop into the mix, and in each case, the students were able to follow along just fine. Again, this seemed like a game to them | |
| Show Me II | Add different lyrics |
| At this point, this was a great time to add in another variation to Show Me (face, ceiling place), which worked out well. During the second class, the students were still sitting, so I had them point down to their space, at which time I reminded them that underneath them was indeed their space. This allowed the students to all sit down. This was also in stark contrast to what happened to the first class - when I asked them to sit down, more than half the class scrambled for a seemingly random yet favorite spot on the mat, and of course sometimes more than one kid favored the same particular square. You can imagine what happened there. | |
| Itsy Bitsy Spider | Talk about sounds, sing song in various ways |
| I asked the students what sounds they heard in the morning, and unlike in past years when I've asked this, most of the students gravitated around sounds made by people. It took a little bit of time to get them to talk about animal sounds (I should have asked if anyone had a pet), and eventually someone mentioned a bird (yay!). We tweeted as a class the tiny sounds of the bird, but I had a bit of a difficult time to get the kids to suggest something that produces a low sound. I steered the conversation towards a train (we all made appropriate noises), and then I asked the students which one was a higher sound. Now, most of the students chose the train instead of the bird, and I suspect that the students focused more on volume levels rather than pitch. I didn't have a lot of time to go into pitch differences, and so I simply moved onto talking about spiders. In the first class, we actually talked a bit about bees, and I interjected the Bee Bee Bumble Bee chant, but after chanting it once (ending with "you are out!"), it seemed like such a nonsequitor that I moved on quickly, and I didn't even bring this up in the second class.
We sang the spider song, and I asked the students what sounds does a spider make. Spiders, as many kids pointed out, are pretty quiet, so we re-sang the song quietly. I asked the students how the song would be if the spider was really tiny, and then I let them in a rendition as if we were all chipmunks. Spiders come in all sizes, and I asked the students if any had ever seem a huge spider. A few said that they did, and then I led them in a rendition of the song with a low booming voice. (I didn't point out that it was "low" - I just sang it in an exaggerated, low voice.) I then asked the students what the song would be like if we sang about a very fast spider, or a nearly motionless spider, and we sang the song with different tempos. | |
| Goodbye My Friends Goodbye | Immerse students into the song |
| It was time to go, and so I told the students that I wanted to sing a goodbye song. Of course, this is particular song has the same melody as Hello My Friends, and so once I started singing it, many of the students tried singing along. It was good to see so many of the kids try the song out without having heard the lyrics before. | |
Behavior-wise, Kindergarteners are far easier to teach than the older grades. Granted, the students still chat on the side, and sometimes they get into mini-spats with each other, usually centered around where one is supposed to sit, but it's a lot easier to recapture their attention. There were some kids who, initially weren't really participating much, but an extra smile here and there oftentimes works well to break the ice and get those students to contribute to the fun.
I'll be sure to break out I Can Sing Up High during my next class. Hopefully that will serve as an easy way to introduce the concept of pitch to the students
As for the name cards, we will definitely have to figure out a better way to distribute these, or perhaps we'll have some of the parent volunteers distribute them with class already underway.
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