| The World Is Big | Have students echo |
| The day before our class, Pete Seeger had passed away, and while I didn’t have a lot of material from Pete Seeger ready, I had used this song in past years. It’s not really a Pete Seeger song; it’s really a song from Ella Jenkins, but I did have a rendition from Pete Seeger that I often use as a reference. As the students were gathering around the carpet, I sang the chorus of the song all the way through. I then had the students who were seated to echo me, and I sang the chorus, this time one line at a time. I walked them through the single stanza also in echo, and then we finished the song with another instance of the chorus in echo.
The students didn’t have much problem with the song. To help out with the words, I also gestured based on the words (e.g. big, small, boat, train, etc.), and that seemed to help; some students were also copying my gesture. This turned out to be a really easy way to get the students warmed up. | |
| Here We Go A-Riding On A Train | Explore the parts of the exercise, all in echo |
| I had the students stretch, breathe in and out, and just warm up a little more while exploring different sounds. I then had them echo sounds from the song - ding, “all aboard”, toot. I of course had to ask the students if they knew where they heard these songs, and students answered correctly. The clickety-clacks seemed to resonate (no pun intended) with the students well.
I didn’t really make it seem too much that we were singing a particular song; I simply had the students echo me the various parts of the song in order, and they did great, even though it was even more echoing. | |
| I’m In the Mood For Singing | Teach answer-response |
| I wanted to sing the whole song to completion first before trying to get the students to respond. For the first class, however, some students immediately after the first line started to shout out “No!” as if they were responding to “How ‘bout you?”. I didn’t really stop this, and the response became infectious. This made it a little difficult to get the students to sing along, although many did - despite the giggles after each “No!”
It was a little difficult to get the students to do the proper response; they were so used to echoing that they continued to echo initially. For the second class, however, they were a little more focused and got used to the response enough that I had the students stand up while I had them jump, tiptoe, and eventually go outside. (More on the outside later.) However, the first class, which was too distracted with saying “No!”, needed something else to refocus the class…. | |
| Mail Myself To You | Review Song |
| The first class needed something just to get them refocused, so I broke into My Myself. Before I started singing, I motioned the first stanza, and that seemed to get the students to quiet down, making them ready for singing. I didn’t want the students to echo this time, and fortunately they were able to sing that stanza along with me. After that stanza, I asked the students what else we did when mailing ourselves, and eventually a student was able to remember the red string and bows. I asked similar questions before each stanza in order to get the students to try to remember how the song went, as it had been five weeks since we last covered the song. I interleaved the first stanza after the 3rd and 4th stanzas, and the kids didn’t miss a beat. | |
| Syncopated Cyril (Shenanigans) | Teach dance and movements |
| I wanted to get the students trying an organized dance, and so I introduced Syncopated Cyril to them. First, I had the students line up in two lines (easy). Then, I informed the students that the student at the front of each line had a special role to walk down the middle to the back (also easy). Then, I taught the students how to “cross the street” - by walking to the other side (not so easy). Crossing the street while maintaining the same order was pretty difficult; more often than not students would try to force their way to the front. For the first class, I tried to get the students to get used to crossing “straight” across, but that wasn’t all that effective. For the second class, before we even started crossing, I asked students to watch who was in front of them, and to make sure that after crossing that they were still behind that same person - that was a little more effective, although it didn’t eliminate the cutting entirely.
Syncopated Cyril is probably the easiest two-line dance available. The song actually instructs students to cross twice (and turn around twice), but I had the students cross only once during the crossing breaks. As the students became more comfortable, I was sending multiple pairs of students down the middle during the “walking down the street” parts of the song, and that helped to reduce some of the cutting, as students realized that they’d all be getting turns. With the lack of rain (we have a bit of a drought over here), I wanted to take the children outside. However, there was a Chinese New Year celebration replete with flags and drums, and since the first class already had focus challenges, I tried doing this inside the room for that class, which proved to be quite the space challenge. I had to remind both classes not to collide with their peers - something that isn’t terribly easy in a confined space. However, it was in the second class where we had to remove a few students temporarily because of raucousness, even with the vastness of the outside. It was important to have another adult helping out with this dance - one of the parent helpers was there, and it made a huge difference to have her there directing the other line. I even took the opportunity to demonstrate crossing the street by going directly across with the other parent helper. | |
I will be teaching again next week, and so I’m hoping to have a little bit of review continuity this time around. I do hope to do a little more rhythm theory; we haven’t done that in a while.
No comments:
Post a Comment