Teaching Notes, 20141105

It was an extremely sunny day today, and the morning was significantly warmer than last week’s class thanks to the end of daylight savings time. And so, I absolutely had to get the students outside. But as promised, I did want to retry one of the Halloween songs from last week, which I did right from the very beginning.

Leaves Are Red And Yellow	Review song and add second stanza
Instead of the usual opening songs that I’ve (over)used, I simply started singing this song as the students gathered onto the carpet. During that time, I also reminded the students to pretend they had a big apple and to take a bite out of it at the end of the 3rd line. After one time through, I told the students to pretend their hands were slowly falling leaves, and we sang it all together, again repeating the dramatically large imaginary apple. I then sang the first line of the 2nd line that I wanted to use - the line with flapping crows and the scarecrow. Before proceeding with the other lines, I had the students flap their arms like crows. Then, when it came to the 3rd line, I asked the students if they knew what a scarecrow looked like, and how they would mimic it. Going from flapping wings to the still scarecrow was pretty easy for them (many stood up to make it even easier), and so we practiced that line. Next, I asked the students if scarecrows are happy or creepy, and when they came to a quick consensus, I had them make the scariest face they could when doing the scarecrow, and to say “beware” in an equally mortifying voice. The students definitely had fun with this! We sang the 2nd stanza one more time together before moving onto the next activity
Bee Bee Bumblebee	Review chant, sing in sol mi
Quickly, I started the chant, which the students of course remembered. I then reviewed the motions, which they more or less remembered as well. I then started singing it in sol mi, and the kids were able to follow me pretty quickly. Sometimes, based on how the students are faring, I’ll introduce something that I really didn’t plan on doing - this time, I followed up the sol mi rendition with the same but now in staccato. The students again followed my lead, and I asked them how that last bit of singing was different. I got a variety of answers, from softer or higher, which might have been true, but wasn’t what I was really looking for. Eventually I did get a student to say something along the lines of “there was space between the words”, or “it started and stopped”. I then introduced the term “staccato”, and how the word’s meaning is evident from how you say the word. We sang the song one more time in staccato. This was something that was completely unplanned, and I didn’t want to throw in “legato”, at least not today.
Tone Bells	Get students playing bells, drones to songs
Our school doesn’t have much in terms of orff instruments, particularly those where you can limit easily what tones are available. I do have a set of tone bells, and so I took out the lower G, C and middle G, C, and used those instead. Upon introducing the tone bell, I talked a bit about how to hold it, and how to play it. I also asked the students what would happen if I held the entire tone bell, including the metal. I got very good answers, and amusingly in both cases, multiple answers were true (including one where a student said that I’d hit myself if I tried playing it with my hand on the metal). I did spend just a little bit of time explaining how sound needs space and the ability to move, and holding the metal prevented this from happening. I didn’t want it to turn into a physics class for kinders, so I then asked a student to come up. Like past years, it was better to have the teachers choose the students to come up, and that seemed to trigger in some of the kids’ minds that being good meant the possibility of going up to play with the bells. With the one student, I tried to get the student used to playing on “1” of “1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4,…”, of course, ignoring the first “1”. Over the years, I did try the countdown (e.g. “3, 2, 1, hit”), but the hit-2-3-4 method seemed more natural for the students, especially once you had to start singing along with the bells. Before having a second student come up, I held up the low G (the lowest of the bells that I had), and I asked the students to compare the two. I then asked them how it would sound compared to the first. Surprisingly most students thought it would sound higher, and when I played it, I got to remind the students about how we once compared the sound of birds to the sound of a passing train - bigger means lower usually. With the second student now available, I informed the class that I was challenging the two to play together - that brought a surprising hush to the group. I then had the students play on the first of the four counts, and then I simply started singing Bee Bee in sol-mi. The singing students sang with me, and the bell players kept up the simple drone pretty well (with my help via gesturing), and that seemed to captivate the students. I proceeded to swap out students, get them playing together, and sing Bee one more time. After swapping the students again, I then sang “Oats Peas Beans”, to which about half of the students followed. During the first class, I tried singing the stanza to Oats, and very few remembered it, so I stuck with just the chorus. After going through Oats once, I then added two more students, giving me four bell players. We sang through Oats again, and then I changed the song to Old MacDonald. I don’t use a lot of songs that are what I consider to be generic childhood songs, but I was pretty sure that Old MacDonald was a familiar tune, and I wanted the students to concentrate on either singing with a drone, or playing a drone. I did discover, however, that Old MacDonald led to the bell players playing when the cows mooed or when the ducks quacked, disrupting the regularity of the drone. Whoops. I wasn’t able to get to all of the students, and there was some grumblings, but I think also with the teachers choosing the well behaved students, most students got the message that being good meant playing instruments.
It’s A Very Good Day	Review, and bring kids outside
After the tone bell exercise - which required very little cleanup time since we only had four bells - I started singing this song, to which about half of the students joined in. I reminded them to ask a good “why?” near the end of the song. I then told them that it was sunny outside, and we ought to go outside. The students were very happy about this, and we proceeded to go outside while singing.
Simi Yadech	Review Dance
Outside, I led the students around a painted circle that was part of their playground. With all of the children standing on the circle itself, I had the students practice the chorus move that we had before - stamp, knee tap, clap, hands shaking in the air. The students were able to follow this just fine, and then I reviewed the other parts of the dance (heel, toe, moving in and out of the circle). I never quite told them that we were doing a dance from more than month ago, but I did tell them that they definitely were to try to find their way back to the circle by the end of the “stanza” portion of the song. I then had the students do the dance with the song. Mid-way through the song, I changed the “chorus” into a pair of stamps, knee taps, and claps (with a single wave of the hands), which the students followed without too much trouble. For the last “chorus”, I had the students try squeezing in a triplet of the moves, which of course turned into a bit of a fun mess. I’m very glad that I was able to revisit this dance, since for both classes I was really hoping to do it one more time. Doing it first inside (back in September) and then outside I think kept the activity fresh in their minds.
The Longer The Faster (Shenaningans)	Teach song
I had a little extra time left with the first class, so I decided to have the children try this activity, where a selected student walks to another part of the circle in 8 counts and chooses another student to do the same, all while the song gets gradually faster and faster. The students had a fun time with it, and with that first class, I asked the students if they noticed what was happening to the song. For the second class, I didn’t really have enough time, but I started it anyway, and we got through about half the song before the recess bell rang. They still also had fun with it, and so I know that I can use this as a backpocket activity in case I need it in the future.

For the first time, I didn’t use “show me” or “class” to recapture the focus of the class; instead, I simply did a few arm waves with the first class, and with the second class, I didn’t have to do anything! It was pretty refreshing!