Last year, I tried to stay in line with the standard curriculum for the first few weeks, and I’m hoping to do that more consistently this time around.
| Hello My Friends | Sing while signing ASL |
| This year, I sang to the students while signing “Hello” and “Friends”. I was hoping that the students would follow the signs, but I only got a few giggles. I then had the students learn the song by rote, one piece at a time, and that worked just fine. We’ll start many future classes with this song, so I wasn’t planning on have the class perfect this quite yet.
After I was done with the song, I asked the class in sol-la-mi to sing back “Hello Mr. Chen” as a way to get them to learn my name. Unlike in previous years, I had forgotten to print out name tags in advance. | |
| Johnny Johnny Up | Get students to explore vocal range |
| In all my years, I actually hadn’t used this until now, and it turned out to be a lot of fun for the kids. They liked speaking really high and really low, and they enjoyed in general being very loud. While usually this is sung with an octave range, I kept it within a fifth (C-E-F-G/G-F-E-C), since I was teaching kinders. Adding to the fun, I had the students move up and down whenever saying “up” and “down.” I then also asked a student to come up, lend us his or her name, which we then used to substitute for “Johnny”. The kids *loved* this, and I did it one more time with another student. | |
| I Like You | Get students to walk in a circle, follow instructions |
| I Like You is a pretty easy song to learn, and so to me it’s really a way to assess what the students know in terms of walking in a circle and listening to instructions. The students originally were sitting on a 5-colored carpet, and so I had students, color by color, to move over to one side of the carpet, forming a circle (well, a rectangle). Next, I wanted the students to start marching to the right, so I asked the students to raise their right hand. At this age, you pretty much get a slightly better than 50-50 split on right-left knowledge, and so I went around the room to make sure that everyone had that right hand up. I then had the students stretch out that hand to the side, and then point in that direction - also not an easy thing to do.
With all of the students pointed in one direction, I had them practice taking small steps, which seemed ok until some students started bumping into each other. I had to make sure that they understood that if there wasn’t much room, they were ok taking the smallest step ever. When the students were proceeding at a slow but regular pace, I then started singing the song. I didn’t ask the students to sing along at first, but eventually as the song progressed the students started singing along. I substituted “I like you” with several different replacements and corresponding motions - jump, tiptoe, slide - while showing the students how to do each one (e.g. not too huge, etc.). Amusingly, in one class, when doing the slide, everyone slid in the same direction, making the rectangle move over a bit. We’ll definitely have more opportunities to walk in a circle, and we’ll continue to walk to the right. | |
| I Can Sing Up High | Teach students the song and motions |
| I asked the students if they brought their instruments, and while most said “no”, and a few offered that they brought imaginary instruments. Eventually some students said that they could use their voice, and that is exactly what I had them explore more, even though we sort of did that already with “Johnny Johnny Up”. I then had them do the movements, followed by the song. I of course got to ask them what was in between high and low, and many students said “middle” to my delight.
I didn’t do too many iterations of this, since we’ll definitely practice this again. | |
| Show Me | Teach students the response |
| I was saving this for only when I really needed it, and it turned out that I needed to use this only once in the 2nd of the two classes. The second class followed this quite well, including the echo. | |
| Oats Peas Beans | Teach chant only with clapping |
| I started with asking the students if they had a garden, and what they had in it. I’m pretty sure I got a mixture of real items in gardens and some from imaginary gardens as well. Each time we got an item, I had the students to echo in sol-mi “I like ____”. We went through tomatoes, strawberries, even legos (lego garden?) Eventually, I steered the items found in a garden to peas, beans, and then oatmeal - I asked if anyone could grow oatmeal in a garden. I next introduced the students to “barley”, which none of the students knew. Finally, I had the students say the four words, “oats”, “peas”, “beans” and “barley” while clapping to each syllable, pointing out that barley required two claps.
After some syllable clapping, I then had the students practice the Oats song in a slow steady chant. The students seemed to follow well, even if they really didn’t know how barley grew. I’ll be sure to have the students try singing the song at a later date. | |
| Itsy Bitsy Spider | Talk about sounds, sing song in various ways |
| I asked the students if they recalled sounds from the morning, and that was surprisingly difficult to get answers from them. However, eventually I was able to squeeze out of the students a bird and a truck or train. We talked about big booming sounds coming from large things, and tiny, tweety sounds coming from small things, and with that, I started singing this song - something that most of the students already knew. I asked the students to try to sing the song again, first as a teeny tiny spider, and then as a huge hulking spider. We ended with pretending that the spider was quiet - we whispered the song together. | |
| Goodbye My Friends Goodbye | Immerse students into the song |
| I ended the day with this song, which was easy for the students to learn as the melody was exactly like the opener. | |
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