Cicada Music Ideas

Here in Maryland, the Brood X Cicadas have started emerging! They have just started to shed their skin and in my neighborhood we are finding them crawling around and clinging to plants. Whether you think they are cute little critters or a terrifying plague (hey, I won't judge you) their once-every-seventeen-year appearance presents the perfect opportunity to connect our music lessons to the natural world. 

Movement

The cicada life cycle is perfect to inspire creative movement in the music classroom! You can talk with your students about how cicadas spend most of their life underground and only emerge for a short time. How can we use levels to show their emergence from the ground? What would you do if you had lived your entire life in one place and suddenly discovered a brand new world? How would you move to respond to this new environment? What kind of music could accompany this movement?

Supercoloring.com

Speech Piece

I composed a speech piece called Cydnee Cicada. It's in triple meter and the rhythm set is dotted quarter, three eighth notes, and quarter - eighth. This makes it a great prep activity for K/1 and rhythm practice for 2/3. Students can act out the different actions that Cydnee does in the piece as they read the text. I composed this piece during my lunch break today and read it to my three year old this afternoon. She LOVED pretending to be asleep, waking up, and doing all of the subsequent actions. Her favorite part was climbing up on a step stool and pretending to chirp in a tree.

Make a copy of this slideshow

Instrument Exploration

You can extend this lesson by incorporating unpitched percussion instruments. What do cicadas sound like when they sing? What instruments sound most like a cicada?

If you have a cricket guiro, this would be a great opportunity to pull it out and maybe point out the similarities and differences between crickets and cicadas.

For more instrument exploration, you could have students perform the piece on barred instruments by improvising a melody. Another option would be to play a bordun or ostinato while reciting the piece. You could split the class into three groups: one to play instruments, one to say the speech piece, and one to do movements/act it out.

I hope you and your students enjoy acting like cicadas this spring! Hopefully learning a little about these insects will help to ease your kids' anxiety about them. Let's make this season fun and enjoy as much time as possible out in nature!

Arrrrr Ye Ready to Talk Like a Pirate?

Tomorrow is my favorite holiday: International Talk Like a Pirate Day! (It's a real thing, I swear!) 

I love pirates (and really any excuse to dress up and speak in a funny accent) so I usually bring the celebration into my classroom for the week and make sure all of my lessons are infused with a certain amount of pirattitude.

This year I've added a few new pirate activities to my arsenal, which the kids at my new school have loved so far. I'll share three new pirate activities with you today:

Pass the Parrot

This is based on a folk dance, "The Chair and Broom." I read about it recently on facebook and also got to try at a Kodály workshop a few years ago. I'm told that the source is an out-of-print book called Backwoods Heritage by Martha Riley. It is a partner mixer dance, which means that as students go through they will end up with different partners each time. It's a great beginning folk dance and great for socialization. 

The setup is one longways set with three students sitting in chairs in a row at the head. The child in the center holds a parrot (I didn't have a good parrot toy available so we used my rubber chicken with great success.) When the music starts, she chooses to either pass the parrot to the person seated to her right or left. Whomever she gives it to is going to remain seated. The child in the center gets up with the other child (the one not holding the parrot) and they sashay together down to the bottom of the set. Then, the child remaining at the head holding the parrot slides into the middle seat and the next person standing in each line in the longways set comes forward and takes a seat. The center child passes the parrot and the dance continues. 

Since the only dance move required is the sashay, it's pretty accessible for students of all ages. I did it with 2nd grade and higher today and everyone enjoyed it. It can be done to any jig. I forgot to bring my New England Dancing Masters CD to school today so I just pulled this Scottish jig medley off YouTube and told the kids it was pirate music. They loved it! 

Fire in the Hole!

For some rhythm review, I devised a simple game that uses flashcards and beanbags. I told the class that my rug was the pirate lagoon and we scattered rhythm flashcards all around the rug. One student would come stand on the edge of the rug and get to "fire the cannon," a.k.a. toss a beanbag onto the rug. Of course, before tossing it they had to shout "fire in the hole!" which made it infinitely more fun. When the beanbag landed on a card, the student had to pick it up, show it to the class and count us in as we all read it together. I used these black and white flashcards, which I printed on colored paper and laminated.

Port Side Pirates!

I'm always looking to add more great illustrated children's books to my library and I recently discovered the delightful publisher, Barefoot Books. The great thing about Port Side Pirates is that the entire thing is a catchy song. It comes with a singalong CD, and what's even better is that the CD includes an instrumental-only track so that once your students know the song they can sing it themselves. The melody is also fully notated with sheet music and guitar tabs in the back of the book, which I love having for reference. 

The song uses tons of really cool pirate vocabulary so I'd make sure to review things like port vs. starboard before singing and reading. If you want your own copy, it's available on Amazon. (Please note that this is an affiliate link, which means I receive a small commission off any purchases made by clicking below.)

I hope some of these pirate activities spark your interest! For more piratey fun, check out my TLAPD post from 2015: Piratical Fun in the Music Room. 

Teaching form in the Classroom

This week I started my unit on form with PreK through fifth grade. I've found in my teaching so far that form is the most difficult unit for a lot of students. It is a very abstract concept, and unless you are an experienced musician, it can be difficult to understand the phrase structure and the subtle differences that make up the form of a piece of music.

Whenever I teach a new concept, I try to make sure my students do a few things: sing it, move to it, play it on instruments, and visualize it.

Being on a cart makes some of these things particularly challenging, but I wanted to share some of the things I've been doing in the classroom to teach form:

Fifth Grade

I wanted to do a fun, engaging lesson with my fifth graders to introduce rondo form. Since I am on a cart at one of my schools, our range of motion is somewhat limited. Even if we move desks out of the way (which I think is a waste of time during our 30 minute block for music), my fifth grade class is 33 students and there just isn't space in their classroom. Since it's icy, we couldn't go outside... I had to think of something we could do inside at our desks.

That's where this FANTASTIC resource comes in:

Rhythm Basketball by Pitch Publications!

The Nutcracker March is in rondo form... How convenient! The play-along slideshow has a different page of rhythm for each section and was labeled with letters so that we could clearly see the form.

I modified the lesson to use tennis balls instead of basketballs, and it worked great! The students bounced their tennis balls off of their desks so there was no need to move furniture around. Everyone had a fun time, myself included. Even the kids who can tend to be tough nuts to crack were opening up and participating. I can't recommend this activity enough! 

Fourth Grade

I started their form unit by reviewing Call & Response. I learned this song in college and have taught with it every year since. We had a lot of fun singing and moving to show the form:

For some of my larger classes, we modified the movement slightly. Instead of being in one large circle, we split up in several groups and just made circles wherever they would fit around the room. The moves are simple enough that my students were able to do them all without my guidance. 

We also sang and played instruments to the Banana Boat Song, Day-O. (I was disappointed that only one of my fourth graders had seen Beetlejuice. Kids these days.) This one is in their Spotlight on Music curriculum, too! I had them play guiro and cabasa on the response, which sounded great with the calypso style.

Third Grade

We were working on AB form (I don't bother throwing the terms "binary" or "ternary" at them. I'd rather give the form a name they are more likely to remember.) We used movement to experience AB form by performing the dance, Niggun Atik. I learned this at a Kodaly workshop last year and was thrilled to see it also included in the third grade curriculum for Spotlight. 

If you've never seen the dance before, this video is a pretty good demonstration:

We start by just learning the footwork, and then the next time I bring this dance into their classroom I add the clapping and Egyptian hand-holding.

Second Grade

I LOVE doing cumulative songs with this age group. They really enjoy the challenge of reading and performing all of the lyrics. In their Spotlight book, we sang "I Bought Me a Cat" and I introduced them to the vocabulary term, "verse." We defined a verse as a repeated melody with different lyrics each time. 

First Grade

Speaking of cumulative songs, I did a really fun one with my first graders: The Rattlin' Bog! I had never heard this song in my childhood... when I got to college a few of my fellow Music Ed majors were appalled that I didn't know it and proceeded to teach it to me. Now I love singing it whenever the mood calls for it! 

Kinder

We learned a few call and response songs, although I have not yet introduced that terminology to my kinders. My favorite is John the Rabbit. I use the version from Music Together. We start by learning the response part, "Yes Ma'am" and "No Ma'am" and move like bunnies whenever we sing that part.

I also went out on a limb and decided to have my first graders sing this song and make finger puppets to go along with it!

I used the bunny from this template:

Source: http://enjoycreativefun.com/tag/easter/

I love incorporating some crafts into my lessons whenever I can. Especially on my long days with no planning time. After teaching seven classes in a row, it's nice to get a break from whole-group instruction and just let the kids create for a little bit.

After they colored their bunnies (and named them, of course), they used them to perform the response part of the song.

The best part, though, is the "bunny dance break" during the instrumental interlude. 

These are some of the things I've done this week to teach form in the classroom. What do you do to teach these concepts in your room?

Stretchy Band!

On Thursday afternoon I was in the school office and the secretary said, "This came in the mail for you... I have no clue what it is." 

It was the stretchy band I ordered!!!

Needless to say, I was super excited and tried it out with almost all of my classes on Friday! Two kinder classes, two first grades, and two second grades, and two third grades. In hindsight, I probably shouldn't have done it all on one day because using it can get exhausting, but I was just so eager to share this new learning tool with my students. 

And they LOVED it!

I started planning by collecting activities to try on my Pinterest. I couldn't find too much on there; I've heard great things about Artie Almeida's Parachutes book and I think I might order it soon to try some of those. If you have experience with this book or have other stretchy band activities you like, please let me know!

Here's some of the things we did yesterday:

• Third grade was learning Liza Jane on solfege, so as a class we decided where the stretchy band should be for each pitch.
• In the primary grades we showed high and low sounds by holding the stretchy band over our head and in our lap.
• We practiced bouncing the band to a steady beat and counting measures in groups of four beats.
• In first grade, we listened to Elgar's piece, "Faeries and Giants." I asked the students to make a prediction about what the faeries would sound like and they voted by holding the band high or low.

I also told my students about my favorite part of using the stretchy band: putting it away! We counted down "3-2-1-GO!" and all let go of the band at the same time so that it snaps into the middle of the circle. What fun.

Have a great weekend!

Listening Lessons Three Ways

One of my goals for this school year is to incorporate more classical music into my lessons. I have many students that, for one reason or another, simply don't know how to respond when they hear certain genres of music.

Last year, I was at a new school and I wanted to play a recording of Renee Fleming before the superbowl so that the students would recognize her singing the national anthem. When they heard the vibrato in her voice, many of them burst out laughing. It was something that they had simply never been exposed to before.

I am making it my mission to change that.

I'm not setting out to impose my personal tastes in music on my students, but I feel that as their music teacher, it is my duty to introduce them to as many different styles and sounds as I possibly can. I know that for many of my kids, general music could be one of the last meaningful interactions that they have with classical music. I am going to do everything in my power to make sure that they leave elementary school having heard enough of it to understand and respond to it in meaningful ways.

Now that I've pontificated a bit on my personal philosophy, here are three ways that I used listening lessons with classical music this week: 

Kinder
To get us in a spooky mood, we used scarves while listening to Danse Macabre by Camille Saint-Saens. The scarves are such a great tool for visual and kinesthetic learners; we do so much with them!

• We can roll it into a ball to show a soft dynamic
• We can open it up wide to show a loud dynamic
• We can bounce it to the beat to show staccato articulations
• We can sway it side to side to show legato articulations
• We can move it high and low to match the melodic contour
• We can stand up, sit down, or toss and catch our scarf to show different sections of the form

Danse Macabre is such a great lesson in CONTRAST, which I love because our youngest children learn what something IS by comparing to what it IS NOT.

2nd Grade
A dear friend of mine from college recently left her teaching job to go back to grad school, and she left me many wonderful learning props. Among them were these strips to go along with In the Hall of the Mountain King by Edvard Grieg.

After telling my second graders the story of the hero and his harrowing escape from the trolls in the mountain, we reenacted the story and sang the main theme saying "run run" for ti-ti and "troll" for ta. After singing it that way for a while, I let the class in on a fun secret: the rhythm to this song is exactly the same as Mary Had a Little Lamb... so we sang the theme again and filled in the nursery rhyme lyrics. What fun!

We also followed a great interactive listening map for this piece that came with my Spotlight On Music 2nd grade curriculum.

5th Grade
For fifth grade, I wanted to give my students the opportunity to really sit and listen to Danse Macabre. I created this listening guide (currently a freebie on my TPT store) and asked them to fill in as many boxes as they could while the piece was playing. We reviewed the difference between open- and closed- ended questions and the difference between writing our facts and writing our opinions. I got some great responses!


I hope my different types of listening lessons have resonated with my students this week. I figure if I got them humming the tune on their way out the door, I've done something right.