Teaching Notes, 20160504

The spring sing looms near, but today was a perfect day to go outside - it was overcast, but not raining (yet).  Going outside always seems to shorten the lesson a bit with the walk outside (and back in), but the benefit of the extra space is worth it.

1. Intro: Teaching Peace.  This time I really did want to have the students learn the song, as most of the student body knows the song from the weekly assemblies from past years.  The students are getting the chorus down pretty well, but they do need help with the verse.  I only went through this once since I found myself strangely unable to hit the higher notes.  Bummer!
2. First Tulip.  This is a pretty easy song, and I used it now because we were well into spring, and it made a nice segue into...
3. Body Solfege.  I reviewed the scale, and then had the students sing/motion the last line of First Tulip, which was basically the lower five notes of the scale.  I then had them echo me in various combinations, such as sol-mi, etc.
4. Paw Paw Patch.  I was able to teach the tune (it's pretty darn simple!) quickly, and during the second iteration of the second line ("let's go find her..."), I then led the students outside, where I had previously set up two lines of cones.  After some obligatory playing with cones, I then had the students line up, each set to the inside of the cone lines - this makes for two very close lines of students; the next time I must remember to keep the lines further apart.
   Today, I was fortunate to have a parent helper, who I assigned as the leader of one of the lines - that really made it easy to explain what each line was doing.  While Paw Paw typically has a single leader crossing over, I decided to have the helper run the second line, and simply have the second line mirror the first during the second stanza.  During the banana peel, this became very easy with a parent helper.  Yay!  I did feel like the students really had fun with this, even though we only did it three times - two one direction and one the other; during each time, we reset the leaders so that we had the lines in the same order each time.
5. Tony Chestnut.  This was an obligatory practice for the spring sing.  The students are slowly getting the 2nd half of the song, and we did that part twice.
6. Bonanopstekker.  Since we were outside, and I had the speaker set up, I wanted to have the kids dancing to some recording.  I covered this one back in the fall, and while I know I rushed the review, some students still remembered what was going on.
7. Back Inside.  I returned the students while singing Paw Paw Patch, and then released the students back to their seats.

Indeed, each dance takes a lot of time, but I feel that the students are generally doing a much better job following during activities that take a long time.