Dollar Tree Finds for Music Teachers

If you've been following me for a while, you might already know that I love bargain hunting. To me, there is nothing better than scouring a clearance aisle or wandering through a thrift store to get the best deals for myself or my classroom. Just in case you don't share my passion for the hunt, I went shopping at Dollar Tree yesterday and curated some excellent items for you to use in your music class:

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A post shared by Music With Mrs. Tanenblatt (@musicwithmrs.tanenblatt)

I recently shared some of my newest Dollar Tree finds on Instagram and I wanted to go into more detail here to explain some of the teaching activities that can be done with these goodies. (Please note that this post is not endorsed or sponsored by Dollar Tree. I just really love shopping for good deals!)

HEART BAGS AND GEMS

A bag with sixteen hearts that can also be used for storage: can you say convenient!? Fill the bag with gems, mini erasers, or rhythm icons and you've got materials ready to go for rhythm dictation, decoding the rhythm of a song, or composing new rhythms. 

Check out this post by Jane Lee to see the materials in action! Or, if you're short on time and would rather get a set like this ready-made for you, check out this option from Hutzel House of Music!

GNOME BEAT BUDDY

Is it just me or is everyone obsessed with gnomes this year? I like that this little guy has a heart stitched on his hat... it seems only natural to call him a beat buddy and pass him around a circle to the steady beat. 

DIY FINGER PUPPETS

I bought these with the intention of making the puppets for my classroom but my four year old has already commandeered them for herself! Whoops! The set comes with pre-sewn finger puppets and felt shapes that can be glued on to make the different designs.

POP ITS

My six year old niece was visiting recently and she saw some bubble wrap we had lying around. She immediately grabbed it and said, "A pop it! I love these toys!" These mini pop its are the perfect size to use as giveaways or keep stashed in a sensory/calm down bin. 

Stay tuned for my next post, which will feature more Dollar Tree bargains and DIY projects. And if you're still in the mood for a good deal, don't forget that there is a sitewide sale coming up on Teachers Pay Teachers on Feb 8 and 9. You can snag any of my products for an additional 20% off during the sale. Happy shopping!

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!

Let There Be Peace

I've been preparing to teach syncopa to my fifth graders soon, so I've been thinking a lot about the Canoe Song. (You know the one... "My paddle's keen and bright." often sung by Girl Scouts?) It's recently been brought up in the music teaching community as a song that's inauthentic and appropriates indigenous culture. Because of that, I'm no longer choosing to teach it. I'm continuing to research music that better represents Native American voices in my classroom. In the mean time, I needed another song to fill the pedagogical gaps that the Canoe Song left behind.

The specific concepts that I was looking for were syncopa and minor tonality. I wanted a song that would be short and simple, easy to learn but engaging enough that students would want to sing it over and over again. I decided to flex my creative muscle and write one of my own.

The song is called, "Let There Be Peace" and uses a driving syncopated rhythm. I wrote it in E minor, an easily accessible key to accompany on ukulele and it sits well for children's voices. The best thing about it, though, is how easy it is to ad lib additional verses. The first two verses establish the form (Verse one is "Let there be peace on Earth" and verse two is "I am the peace on Earth.) and then you and your students can brainstorm additional verses ad nauseam. This makes it a great song to prepare a concept in a Kodály inspired classroom, because you can change the lyrics and sing it over and over again.

Listen to the song here:

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This is an original song I composed to take the place of the canoe song in my repertoire. It's in e minor and uses the syncopa rhythm. 🎶☮️🌍

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And here's a copy of the notation:

I hope this song brings you and your students peace during these crazy times. If you use it in your classroom I'd love to hear how it goes!

 

Singing Games for Online Learning

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!

Testing, Testing, One Two Three

One of my favorite things to do at the beginning of the school year is assess students' ability to keep a steady beat by moving to music. Just because I'm teaching virtually doesn't mean I can't have my students perform creative movements! I wrote this quick little chant as a way to get students to take turns being the "leader" and demonstrate beat moves on camera for their classmates.

I was also thinking it could be turned into a guessing game. One student (the "guesser") could be selected to physically turn their back away from their computer so they can't see what's going on. Meanwhile, the teacher writes down the name of another student who will be the leader and holds it up to the camera to show the rest of the class. Perform the chant (mics muted) and the leader student performs steady beat moves for the class to copy. The guesser student turns around and watches to try and figure out who the leader is. 

I wrote this chant with a simple enough flow for young students to be able to perform it. However, it does have one advanced rhythm (eighth note with paired sixteenths) so you could use it to prepare or present that concept with older students as well.

If you try this game and chant with students, I'd love to hear how it goes!

31 Days of Rhythm: Engage Students with Rhythm Sudoku

Can you believe that we are more than halfway through the month of March already? Spring is finally here and we are in the middle of celebrating Music in Our Schools Month! There is so much to be happy about! 

For today's post, I'm going to share a brilliant idea that I learned about several years ago at a workshop: Rhythm Sudoku. 

If you are anything like me, you probably first heard about Sudoku about eight years ago. Maybe you never really got into it because "math isn't your thing" (which is ironic because a Sudoku puzzle actually doesn't require any arithmetic.) Or maybe you have experience completing the puzzles and are wondering how on earth these number squares can relate to rhythm. 

Either way, I'm happy to show you! In this post, I'll walk you through the steps required to make your own Rhythm Sudoku puzzle (or for those of you more results-oriented, you can buy ready made ones in my store. But that really does take all of the fun out of it, don't you think?)

A traditional Sudoku grid is 9x9, but we don't need to get quite so involved with ours! Let's make a 4x4 grid to start out. Once your puzzle is complete, you can think of it like a composition with four measures of four beats each.

This will be the most time-consuming portion, but once you get the hang of creating them, you should be able to create a puzzle in a minute or two. 

You have to select four different rhythms to use in your puzzle. Start plugging them in the grid wherever they fit. You can't have the same rhythm twice in any row or column. 

Make sure you make note of what your completed puzzle looks like. Then, you can erase most of the rhythms so that your puzzle is ready! The more squares you erase, the more difficult your puzzle will be. For beginner level puzzles, I like to make it so that at least one row or column can be solved immediately.

Once you have created your puzzle, you are ready to share with your students. I like to create several puzzles of increasing difficulty levels to challenge my students as they are ready. Once they have solved the whole puzzle, they have a grid of music notation, which can be used for reading practice.

You can read them the "right way," as in read each beat from left to right. Or, for more crazy fun, you can read the lines backwards. Or you can read the columns going up or down. There are so many different combinations and ways to interact with the completed puzzle grid! It's a surefire way to keep kids curious and engaged while reciting rhythm syllables!

31 Days of Rhythm: Prepare Quarter Notes and Eighth Notes using In the Hall of the Mountain King

This has to be one of my favorite pieces of music to use in my teaching. I love to use classical pieces that my students immediately recognize. They are so much more engaged when they've heard the piece in their lives already.

In this piece, there are just so many great musical concepts just waiting to be unpacked: tempo, dynamics, orchestral instruments, storytelling, pitch, and of course, rhythm. The clear rhythmic motive in this piece is so catchy and accessible for even my youngest students.

For our MIOSM blog series, I am sharing how I use this piece to prepare my young students for quarter note and barred eighth notes. Here are a few different tried-and-true ways to use it:

1. One of my favorite ways to introduce the piece is to play a recording of it while dramatically telling them the story of Peer Gynt’s attempt to flee from the trolls. I think that storytelling is one of the most overlooked aspects of our craft. It is arguably the oldest form of human expression, and I love being able to get my students' attention and help them hone their aural skills by telling them stories.

(If your school and administration is super open-minded, perhaps you could also play them this terrifying video? Just kidding. Don’t show this video unless you want angry parents calling you demanding to know why you showed their child this demonic video in music class.)  

Anyway, while I tell them the story, I begin chanting “tiptoe, tiptoe, tiptoe, troll” to the rhythm while our hero tries to escape. When the tempo and dynamics increase, I change it to “run run, run run, run run, troll!” It doesn’t take long before all of my students are chanting it along with me. Most are also singing along to the melody.

2. In a previous blog post, Listening Lessons Three Ways, I shared an awesome tool that was given to me by a former teacher: she calls it her "Marauders Map". It is actually two long paper rolls (they are a few feet wide and look great up on a chalkboard or dry erase board.) I start with the iconic notation and then when I'm ready to actually present quarter and eighth notes, I'll put the other one up side-by-side to compare.

3. In case you don't want to make your own map, here is a free printable/projectable one that I created using iconic notation:

4. Another fun activity to do with “Mountain King” is compare it to Mary Had A Little Lamb. I challenge my students to see if they can sing the lyrics to “Mary Had A Little Lamb" to the melody of "Mountain King." The same can also be done using "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" and it's fun to try and do the movements faster and faster with the accelerando in the piece.

5. One of the things that makes "In the Hall of the Mountain King" so accessible for students is the fact that it is so pervasive in popular culture. It's been covered and re-recorded by a number of popular artists and it is frequently heard in TV and movies. I've been told it is sampled in the song "Hair Up" from the new Trolls movie (how appropriate given the subject matter.)

No matter the source, there is a good chance that your students will recognize the tune when they hear it in class, and that is a great way to get them engaged in the lesson! 

6 New Activities Using Flashcards in the Elementary Music Room

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!

Piratical Fun in the Music Room!

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! 

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Pirates of the Caribbean listening example

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.

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Pirate Rhythm Patterns

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

It's free in my Teachers Pay Teachers store until Talk Like a Pirate Day on September 19! 

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Just Dance! Kids Pirate Video

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.

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Pirate Vocal Explorations

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.

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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!

Full STEAM Ahead!

Raise your hand if you love Arts Integration!

Raise your hand if the concept of Arts Integration completely stresses you out!

I have definitely been on both sides of this coin. So far, out of the four schools in which I've taught, two have been STEAM schools where arts integration is expected out of the classroom teachers and cultural arts teachers. (STEAM = Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Math) I've been fortunate enough to attend several local workshops on arts integration, the most interesting of which would definitely have to be The Arts Integration Conference at UMBC. 

I am by no means an expert on the subject, but I would like to share one important principle of arts integration:

An arts integrated lesson should have TWO objectives: one for the arts component of the lesson, and one for the general ed component. For example: While it's certainly wonderful to use a catchy song to teach multiplication tables, this would NOT be an AI lesson, because the music is merely there as a tool to enhance the math lesson. 

The reason I bring this up in a post today is because I wanted to share my most recent product, Musical Math! 

A brief backstory: Last year, the entire faculty at one of my schools attended a PD session with Greg Tang. It's not very often that I am asked to attend a session on teaching math, and this session showed me many teaching models that I had never heard of. When he discussed the part-whole relationship model, I immediately saw how it could be applied to music. Now that I am building up my TpT store, I finally got around to developing this product!

The product includes 30 different examples. If you have an electronic white board, you can draw the missing notes directly onto the slides. Or, you could print these slides for students to complete individually. (If there is interest I might spend the extra time to make a student follow-along packet. Let me know in the comments if this is something you might be interested in.)

I can't wait to use this with my fourth graders tomorrow. Be on the lookout for more STEAM related blog posts in the future.

New Year, New Layout!

Surprise! As an impulse, I decided to change up my layout a bit today. I wasn't happy with the way my old header looked, and then things just snowballed from there :) 

I figure since I am showing off a brand new look, I should also take this opportunity to show up a new product from my TpT store:

I'm particularly jazzed about these worksheets because I am going to be starting my harmony/texture unit soon. This project will allow my students to experiment with writing three-part music and hearing how the texture fits together. 

I recently downloaded some instrument clipart from The Dancing Crayon so I really wanted to include that in this product. I also wanted to make something that incorporated a cut-and-paste component... I used to think that my 3-5 graders were "too cool" and "too mature" for that kind of thing, but I'm starting to rethink that, since they LOVE any time I ask them to color with crayons. So we're going to try it out. 

I made an exemplar and I have to admit... I had fun meticulously cutting and pasting the little squares!

I'm looking forward to trying it out with many different grades, since the actual rhythmic content is open-ended and can be adjusted to meet the level of whichever students are working on it.

Once we get back to school, I will let you know how it works out!

December Plague

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.