In planning for my upcoming semester of teaching music online, I've been thinking a lot about how I can engage my students with singing games. As a Kodály-inspired teacher, singing games are the bread and butter of my music program, and I was not ready to give them up when I found out I wouldn't be seeing my students face-to-face this fall. So I got together with a group of creative teacher friends to compile this list of ten singing games and activities that you can do to get your students singing, moving, and playing during online learning. Enjoy!
Songs and Games in this playlist: Brown Bear Brown Bear, Button You Must Wander, Great Big House in New Orleans, Miss Mary Mack, Rhythm Telephone, Rico's Pizza Restaurant, Solfa Simon, Telephone, and two ways to play We Are Dancing in the Forest!
This time of year, my first graders are usually getting ready to add la to their melodic arsenal. They've been practicing so-mi songs for a while and it's time for the next step in their learning sequence. Since I completed my Kodály Level I last summer, I learned a lot about selecting quality songs to prepare, present, and practice la. I'm writing about one of my favorites today:
Prepare
This is a great song to prepare la. For those of you who are not familiar with the Kodály method, there are three stages to learning a new concept: prepare, present, and practice. During the prepare stage, the students are playing games and singing songs that include the new concept but they haven't made it conscious yet. The prepare stage is all about exposure and aural immersion. When preparing a new concept, I like to use songs that invite lots and lots of repetition, and it doesn't get much more repetitive than Bounce High, Bounce Low!
For this stage, I like to play the classic playground game, Over Under. Any time I can bring a playground ball into my music room, my kids go nuts! (When I taught on a cart, I would modify this by playing using something smaller like a tennis ball and they still loved it.) My musical version is slightly different from the traditional game. Here's a video version of the original:
The object of the game is for the students to pass the ball backwards around the entire circle without dropping it. Have students stand in a large circle, all facing the same direction. Make sure there is plenty of room between each child. Choose one student to hold the ball to start. The students will pass the ball on the second and fourth beat of each measure (either on a la or on a mi.) If passing on the high note, the student must pass it over her head, and if passing on the low note, the student must pass it between her legs. The student behind her needs to be paying attention and ready to catch it because otherwise it's easy to drop the ball in this game- literally!
A common pitfall with this game is that the students get so excited about passing the ball that they forget to match it up with the pitches as they go. I will assist with the singing or play the pitches on a melodic instrument so that they can clearly hear how it is meant to align. If they start passing slowly I slow the tempo of the song to match. Likewise, if they are in a groove and passing faster, I will sing faster to match.
Once a class has mastered the large circle formation, I will let them play it competitively. I will break the class up into two or three teams and give each team a ball. Instead of standing in a circle they stand in a line and the object is to get the ball from the front to the back.
For an added level of complexity, you can lengthen this game: when the ball gets to the back of the line, the last person has to run up to the front and start it over again. This continues until every player on the team has had a turn to be up front.
This can get chaotic with different teams singing the songs at different tempi, so if the noise is too much for your class, you can have each team go one at a time and use a timer to see which team can perform it the fastest.
Present
After several weeks of singing a variety of songs that include la, it's time to formally present the concept. In my Kodály level I class, I learned that a good song for presenting a concept needs to meet certain criteria. First, it should contain mostly known concepts. In this case, the known melodic material is so and mi. There should only be one instance of the new note, preferably appearing close to the end of the song. Since Bounce High, Bounce Low is such a short song, it doesn't fit this criterion perfectly, but I've had success using it nonetheless. (Some other good la present songs: Bell Horses, Snail Snail, Lucy Locket, Hickety Tickety Bumble Bee.)
When the new note occurs, it should be surrounded by its closest known neighboring pitch. This means that songs including the mi-la leap are too difficult to use for present songs. It's best to find songs that go from so to la directly.
Once your kiddos know the song very well (and after playing the game for a few weeks, they definitely will!) they are ready for the present lesson. You start by deriving the rhythm on the board. For this reason, you always want to pick songs with familiar rhythms when doing a formal present lesson. My first graders learned ta and ta-ti at the beginning of the school year, so this song meets the criteria perfectly.
After they derive the rhythm, you will add the solfege pitches underneath. You always want to go from the known to the unknown: first finding all the sos and mis, and then finding the new note.
The students should be able to aurally distinguish the fact that the new note is higher than so. At this point, you give the new note a name, la, and show the students how to label it and sing it. I also use this time to teach the Curwen hand sign that goes with it.
Practice
The final step in the sequence is to practice the new note. With Bounce High, Bounce Low, I like to take advantage of the fact that a bouncy ball fits perfectly like a note on the staff! I use it as iconic notation and show a large ball for quarter note and two smaller balls for paired eighth notes.
There's plenty of other ways to practice la as well: reading and writing the note, singing solfa games, improvising on instruments, playing a melodic ostinato, etc. This is the stage in the process where small group centers and individual work can be used to reinforce learning as well.
Have fun teaching musical concepts through this great game!
Hello all, it's great to be back! I came back to work from maternity leave a few weeks ago. Baby Tanenblatt was born in October and is absolutely perfect. Now I'm learning how to navigate life as a working mom and every day certainly brings its new challenges.
One of my favorite ways to tackle challenging teaching situations is through collaboration, and this month I'm collaborating with some fantastic music teachers to share our favorite tools for teaching melodic concepts. Today I'm going to share with you some of my favorite tricks for teaching melodic contour. Please note that this post contains Amazon affiliate links and I receive a small commission from items purchased through the links.
When teaching melodic contour, I find that a lot of young students get confused with the language. They hear high and low and confuse it with loud and soft. By actively engaging them in listening and singing, I find that this confusion generally clears up after a few lessons. I usually use a combination of the tools listed below to help my students understand what upward and downward melodic direction really means.
Slide Whistle
My slide whistle has been one of my favorite additions to my classroom this year. I introduced it to my Kindergarteners at the beginning of this school year and their faces just lit up the first time they heard it!
Students always love listening to patterns that I play. I will play a glissando on the whistle and then ask the students to show the direction that the melody is going. Once I feel like they all understand the difference between upwards and downwards motion, I make each example more complicated, involving lots of high and low leaps. I ask students to act them out by standing/sitting or waving their arms to show the high and low sounds. If you're looking for an inexpensive slide whistle to play, you can try this one:
Pitched Percussion
I love to use my pitched percussion instruments to reinforce melodic contour as well. I love to use Boomwhackers for this: I'll line up eight kids each with one scale degree and have them play up and down the major scale. We compare the size of the tubes to the pitch they produce to tie-in to the science of sound. I make them wait and only tap their tube when someone points to them, so one person gets to be the conductor and the eight kids playing love to "be a note" and play on their turn. We will do this along with simple songs that outline the steps to the major scale, such as The Snowman, Ebeneezer Sneezer, and Down, Down, Yellow and Brown. If you don't have Boomwhackers, the same thing can be done with handbells or tone bars.
Vocal Exploration
A great way to help students make a visual connection is by displaying vocal explorations. A friend of mine gave me these great pathways that she made out of paper and I have fun going "old school" using them.
I typically designate one student to be the leader and he or she will guide us through singing the shape. I usually have students singing along on a neutral vowel, such as "oo." I will have my leader use a pointer or hold a manipulative (for example, a big foam snowflake in the winter time) to show where we are along the line.
I've been keeping these red shapes attached to my dry erase board with magnets and when they're not in use, I just push them off to the side. Then, my older students all want to know what those big red things are for and we have fun playing with them, too!
If you are more interested in a high-tech version, there are lots of vocal explorations available for download on TpT that you can project.
One of my favorites is Flying Freddie, an animated version where students can follow the little aviator as his airplane goes up and down.
Otamatone
OK, I will admit that I have a bit of an impulse shopping problem. I saw a video demonstration of this little guy last year and just had to have it for my classroom:
It's an electronic instrument and has a crazy sounding timbre that kids love. You can play melodies on the neck of the instrument and it has a little switch on the back to change between low, medium, and high octaves. You can play distinct notes or glide up and down to create a flowy melody. Students can listen and respond by stretching up high or down low. No written explanation can really do this thing justice, so here's a video demonstration by the manufacturer:
The Otamatone is a fun teaching tool and also a great behavior incentive: as soon as students hear it they all immediately want to get their hands on it! (Can you blame them?) I'll announce to a class that when they line up, I'm looking for three students who walk calmly and quietly to their spot in line. Those three will get to play a short melody for their peers.
If you are as crazy as I am, you can get one on Amazon. There's several different sizes and colors available. This is the one I use:
Yarn Composition/Improvisation
A few weeks ago, my local Kodály chapter, MUSIK, hosted a free workshop at Loyola University. One of the presenters was the incomparable Amy Weishaar who shared a breadth of information on creating multisensory lessons for students with learning disabilities. One of the greatest takeaways for me was a demonstration that she led using yarn to compose and improvise. Every student gets a length of yarn to show their melody and she also suggests giving each child a felt square for a backing so it has something to cling to.
After children have created their melody, they can sing it or play it on an instrument, exploring the high and low sounds they can produce. She suggested using the black keys of a piano keyboard so that it will be a pentatonic melody. You could also do this the opposite way and sing/play a melody, then ask the students to manipulate the yarn to show what they heard.
I hope this collection of ideas sparks something new for you. It's always great to find new ways to teach a basic concept like melodic direction. Do you have another kinesthetic, aural, or visual way to teach melodic direction? Please share in the comments!
Ah, flashcards. Some music teachers love 'em, others can't stand 'em. I happen to enjoy using flashcards to review rhythmic and melodic concepts with my students. However, when we use flashcards in my classroom, we are never just reading flashcards. I've put together a list of six ways that I use flashcards to inspire fun and creativity in my music class:
1. Fly Swatter
This activity is fun for kids and you can be a little bit competitive with it! Attach several flashcards to your chalk or dry erase board. Divide the class into two teams and have one volunteer from each team stand in front of the board. Give each volunteer a fly swatter. The teacher* then reads one of the flashcards out loud. Whichever volunteer swats the correct flashcard first wins a point for his/her team.
*To increase student engagement/participation, you can assign another student the task of reader.
2. Big Circle
Arrange your flashcards on the floor in a big circle. (You should either have one for each student or half as many if you would like your students to work in pairs.) Have each student or pair stand in front of a flashcard and read the notes. Ring a bell or chime to signal for every student to move clockwise to the next flashcard and read it.
Anchor yourself at one flashcard and this can be an easy way to take a subtle assessment.
3. Heads Up
For this game, the teacher holds a flashcard above his or her forehead so that all the students can read it. Instruct the students to clap or sing the notes on the card. If the students recite it clearly and accurately, the teacher should be able to identify exactly which notes were on the flashcard.
To differentiate this activity, have stronger students play the teacher role and try to identify the notes. This makes a great center or small group game.
4. Project on an IWB
There are limitless options when it comes to electronic flashboards on your interactive whiteboard. You can find great videos on YouTube that have rhythmic playalongs to familiar songs. You can also get a ton of review games on Teachers Pay Teachers that make reading flashcards fun and interactive.
Assign students to be the "pointer" and the "mouse clicker" to incorporate more jobs in the classroom.
5. Memory Game
Display several flashcards. The teacher randomly picks two or more flashcards and recites them one after another. Students try to identify the patterns and arrange them in the correct order.
This can also be a fun hands-on activity if you have index card sized flashcards. You can give a stack to each student or group so that students can arrange them on their own.
6. Composition Inspiration
Coming up with a composition from scratch can be intimidating for young musicians. Try displaying rhythmic flashcards and asking students to assign a pitch for each beat for an easy melodic composition.
You could also display a number of flashcards and give students the option of which ones they would like to use and arrange them in whatever order they like.
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I hope some of these ideas have inspired you or refreshed your memory with some great ways to use flashcards in the music room. If you need flashcards to get you started, I have a huge bundle of winter-themed flashcards available in my store right now. You can also see my entire Flash Cards collection to check out more options for the rest of the school year!
Today I wanted to share one of my new favorite songs for Thanksgiving: Turkey in the Barnyard! It's a piggyback song to the tune of Charlie Over the Water. I love that it's mostly a So-Mi song, but the end is on Do so it's a great song to prepare or present that note.
I had my students read the lyrics first, and then I wanted to see if they could memorize the lyrics, so I used one of my favorite SmartNotebook features: the shade!
If you've never used it before, it is SO helpful in helping students to focus. You can drag it across the screen so that only a portion of the slide is visible.
Each time they sang the song I covered up another line of the lyrics until eventually they were singing it completely from memory.
I also put the pitches on a simple two-line staff so that next time my students can read it that way and see Do on a ledger line.
I also play the same game as Charlie Over the Water: children are seated in a circle and one person gets to be "it." While we are singing, the person who is it walks around the outside of the circle. On the last line of the song, he or she taps someone and they have a "duck-duck-goose style" chase.
Kids love playing the game and they also love the visuals I created for it on the Smart Board.
My dearest readers, I have a confession to make: I have a slight obsession with pirates. Their depiction in cinema, the history and lore around them... I love it all!
I'm on the far left in this photo with some of my best friends from college.
We were on our way to a local pirate festival!
Holding a live parrot!
My first ever race was a pirate themed 5K in 2013!
You could imagine my excitement when my good friend and fellow teacher/blogger, Molly Patrician, gave me her copy of Teach Like a Pirate by David Burgess:
My facebook fans will recognize this photo from last summer!
I share all of this with you, dear readers, so that you can imagine my excitement every year when I get to celebrate Talk Like a Pirate Day! If you've never heard of this remarkable holiday, check out the background of it here.
I love to honor TLAPD in my music room with a week of piratical fun songs and activities. Here's a sampling of some of the things I've done in the past few years to celebrate:
The Gallant Ship
I learned this song from a professor in a college practicum course, and I've taught it every single year since then. The kids LOVE it. I've looked everywhere for a source for the song. The closest source I can find for the lyrics online is the last verse from the sea shanty titled, "The Mermaid."
This is the melody as I learned it. If you know a source, PLEASE let me know! :)
After singing the verse for the A section, we do a spoken call/response for the B section:
She sank? She sank. In the sea? In the sea. Are you sure? We're sure. How sad! We agree.
So there you have it! The A and B sections can repeat ad nauseum. I typically add class percussion instruments to the A section as well. You could also add a bordun on G-D on Orff instruments and have students switch instruments during the B section. Lots of fun possibilities and great for practicing eighth/sixteenth note combinations!
I've played this fun recording of the Pirates movie theme for some of my younger classes this week. We used scarves as we listen and responded to the high and low sounds in the melody.
I originally created this resource for my PreK students as a pre-reading exercise. As I point to each pirate symbol, the students clap and say its name. While using it in class today, I started to discover that there are about a million different ways to expand on it and use it with older students as well.
Practice keeping a steady beat and distinguish between beat and rhythm
Practice left-right tracking skills
Identify patterns and repeated symbols
Use an IWB to draw the rhythm symbols under each picture
Clap or play on percussion instruments
Encourage improvisation by having students think of new words/patterns
For a fun movement activity, I played this video for my Kinder students. We practiced marching like pirates to the steady beat and following along with the moves in the video.
I love vocal explorations and I wanted to create one with a simple story line. I wrote a little story about a pirate named Annabelle and her parrot, Blackbeak. As I read this story to my students, they follow along with their voices.
I've found that my students really like when there's a story that ties it all together. The last time we read one like this, they all clapped at the end! How cute! You can purchase this story in my TpT store.
Well, readers, I hope I've inspired you to add some pirattitude to your music lessons this week. If you have any other awesome pirate activities, I'd love to hear about them in the comments section below.
Also, stay tuned for one more pirate-related announcement on Friday evening... a few music teachers and I have something fun planned!
I'm one day late to the party, but today I am linking up with Mrs. Miracle's Music Room for this fun linky, "Worked for me Wednesday."
My subject for "Worked for me Wednesday" is a tried-and-true game that I love to play with my intermediate students: Mystery Message from makingmusicfun.net.
First off, if you've never visited Making Music Fun, you need to go check it out. NOW.
I'll wait here.....
Ok, welcome back. Is your head spinning from the sheer number of high quality music resources available? I thought so. This website was my SAVIOR when I first started teaching. Now that I've gotten into Teachers Pay Teachers, I sometimes forget about the resource gems that I've gotten from MMF.
The game I am talking about today is Mystery Message. Setup is very easy (always a plus when you teach on a cart, as I do.) Just print enough game cards for every student and distribute some kind of writing implement.
I opted to laminate mine and use dry erase markers so that students could follow along and write each letter on the bottom as they went along.
This is a fantastic game for practicing aural skills. I have my students sing the patterns using solfege. Here are a few recommendations I have to maximize student success:
Use the gradual release model: Also known as "I do, We do, You." First, I model an example for the class using the document camera. Then, have the class figure out an entire word in a whole group setting. Finally, when the students are ready, I will let them pair up so that one student sings the clues while the other tries to guess the word.
Provide a range of letters: Rather than just singing a pattern and asking the students to identify it, I give them a range (for example: A-L) so that my students don't get overwhelmed.
Sneak in assessment: I LOVE using games for assessments because they are a low-pressure way for me to get an idea of where my students are. While they are playing the game in pairs, I will circulate around the room to listen for rhythmic accuracy and pitch matching.
I hope you enjoy this game as much as I do! Don't forget to hop over to Mrs. Miracle's Music Room to read the rest of the posts in the linky party.
Well, it's happened... after being a part of a super fun winter concert at one of my schools on Tuesday, I came down with the inevitable achey, coughey, ruin-your-singing-voicey cold. This brings up the age-old question of "what am I going to do with my classes when I have NO singing voice?"
Here's what I've been working on in some of my grades... Some no-singing winter music lessons:
5th Grade: Dreidel After already learning the song, "S'vivon, Sov Sov Sov" for Chanukah, I told my students a little background about the holiday and they were eager to learn the rules to the dreidel game. I had them play using bingo chips instead of gelt. While they were playing, I had a playlist of Chanukah and Klezmer songs playing in the background.
4th Grade: Snowball Fight Since we've been learning notes on the treble staff, this was the perfect time to practice reading and playing them. For my snowball fight game, every student writes a four-note melody, crumples it up, and tosses it across the room at the opposing team. Then they try to earn points by correctly reading and playing the melodies that were thrown at them. This gave my students practice reading and playing barred percussion with a competitive-but-friendly twist.
Trepak Cup Game
This awesome cup game has been floating around Pinterest for a while, and the Speed Stacks cups that I ordered last month just arrived... can you say perfect timing? My fourth graders had a BLAST learning this and they got a bonus lesson on form by doing it!
Speed Stacks: These are great because they are so durable and can be easily transported on my cart.
1st Grade: Winter Melody project I've been planning this one and gathering materials for it for a few weeks now. It was the first time I'd done a truly crafts-y activity with my kiddos. (Usually coloring with crayons is as inventive as I get with my young ones.) Since my first graders are already familiar with so, mi, and la on a two-line staff system, this project was an opportunity to show what they know by composing their own melody. I gave each child eight cotton (snow)balls that they glued on the staff. I let them take their projects home right after making them, so I don't have any examples of students' work. Here's my exemplar, to give you an idea:
Kindergarten: Winter rhythm cut and paste I was fortunate enough to win this AMAZING set from Jena Hudson at Sew Much Music. Even though my rhythm unit is technically over, reteaching and reviewing is crucial for little ones. And as musicians we all know that rhythm is important in every piece of music we teach. So we had a nice rhythm review with some of the great activities included in this bundle, culminating in this cut and paste activity.
Disclaimer: My kinders needed a LOT of teacher help reading these words. However, they loved clapping them and figuring out the syllables/rhythm once they knew what the words were.
Teaching when you're feeling under the weather is decidedly icky, but sometimes you just don't have a choice. The students deserve to learn and I try not to cop-out and just show a video if I can help it. These were some very effective alternatives that saved me during this week with no voice.
In college I had a professor who used to tell us to use the CASE method of teaching: Capture And Steal Everything!
I was reminded of that today as I popped into my colleague's room and saw her doing an awesome activity. I immediately said to her, "I'm stealing that!" and whipped up a quick little Smart Notebook to incorporate it in my next lesson.
What I saw was this brilliantly simple way of writing out text so that it matches the melodic contour of a song:
Writing out the melody like this was a great transitional way to help my 2nd graders to recognize higher and lower pitches with a visual.
Then, I transferred the song to the staff. In our last lesson we practiced finding so and mi on the staff with my game "Help Me Find Me" (which is still 28% off in my TPT store until midnight tonight) so we were ready to identify the line and space notes of this melody and sing it with solfege:
Now I just threw this little notebook file together during my lunch break today, so it doesn't have any bells and whistles, but you're welcome to download it for free and try it out. See if your students respond as well as mine did to the visuals!
