"The Snowy Day" by Ezra Jack Keats

Last week in 1st grade music, we had a lot of fun reading the Caldecott medal winning book "The Snowy Day" by Ezra Jack Keats. Written in 1962, this story follows a day in the life of Peter, a young boy who ventures out into the snow in New York City. When Keats decided to write "The Snowy Day" he wanted to feature minority children in New York City as the main characters, since at that time, that was something that had not been done. Written in the height of the civil rights movement, to this day "The Snowy Day" is loved not only for it's beautiful illustrations and gentle story, but for helping to break down racial barriers. 

Throughout the story, we added songs, chants and other musical activities that went along with what was happening in the book. We sang a song as we pretended to get dressed to go out into the snow with Peter, we did a chant about snowflakes where students moved like snowflakes while improvising their own duple meter rhythms, we did some vocal exploration while Peter was climbing up and sliding down the hill, and even had our own "snowball fight" while singing tonal patterns. "The Snowy Day" has become a favorite in our music room and we had a great time acting out the story!

To project the book on my large projector screen, I found a great resource online called We Give Books which is a free online collection of children's books. If you go to the website....www.wegivebooks.org you can sign-up for free and then you will have access to over 150 classic children's books! 

Here is the link for "The Snowy Day" that we read in class. http://www.wegivebooks.org/books/the-snowy-day

Winter Olympics Fun!

In preparation for the Winter Olympics Opening Ceremonies which will happen next Friday, February 7th, the 2nd graders learned a Russian folk dance called "Sasha." The song starts with students facing their partner, and pointing at each other saying "Sasha! Sasha! Ras, Dva, Tri!" which means "one, two, three!" in Russian. The dance involves fast hand claps with a partner, swinging each other round, and then finding a new partner. In this upbeat dance, students had a chance to be partners with many different people, which was a lot of fun! We also did a rhythm activity where students got in groups of two and had to complete a worksheet where they figured out the rhythms of various Winter Olympics events and put them in the correct boxes. They have done similar activities before and they did a fantastic job! It was great to see how quickly they have grown with this particular skill. Then, each pair was able to create their own rhythmic composition using the events given and were able to perform them for the class. 

We had a lot of fun talking about the upcoming Olympics and we hope you enjoy watching them with your families in the upcoming week!