Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Hi First Graders! I have had a lot of fun the past few weeks singing our songs for our "Spring Sing" concert on May 27th with you! Heres the video that we saw in class for "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" so you can practice at home. See if you can follow along!

Cool composing game!

I just found this awesome composing game called the "Sound Matrix." To play, just click or click and drag on different squares to create some cool sounding music. If you want to erase what you did and start over, just click the space bar. Happy Friday and happy composing!
Sound Matrix

Teachers Go Bananas!

Today was "Teachers Go Bananas!" at Bryant School and students were visited by many different book characters. Fancy Nancy, Miss Frizzle and many more characters came in and were able to read to our students.  The music room was lucky enough to be visited by The Jazz Fly all day! He read his book to the students, and they practiced speaking in his "jazz language" by repeating "ZAH-baza, BOO-zaba, ZEE-zah RO-ni?" They even got a chance to hear some jazz and get their wiggles out! Here is a picture of The Jazz Fly who visited us today, but for some reason, they kept calling him Ms. Ritter?! I have no idea why!

Happy St. Patrick's Day! (on Monday...)

This week in music class, we have been learning about Irish music in honor of St. Patrick's day on Monday. In 2nd grade, we listened to some traditional Irish jigs and identified traditional instruments used in Irish folk music. We learned a song called "Michael Finnegan" where we learned a dance and practiced singing in harmony as we learned the bass line. We also learned a song called "The Bog Down in the Valley-O" as well. We even learned how to do a jig step and were able to dance with a partner. Click on the orange arrow below to listen to Mrs. Martin's 2nd graders singing our bog song. We had so much fun singing and dancing to this song and we hope you enjoy it!

In Kindergarten and 1st grade, we learned a song called "Leprechaun Dance" which helped us in learning about our big (Macro) and little (Micro) beats. For the first half of the song, we walked around the room to the macrobeat, pretending like our feet were saying "du." Then, each student picked up a piece of gold that was lying face down on the floor and had to move whatever body part was drawn on the paper to the microbeat. Click on the link below to hear Mrs. Bass's 1st graders having fun singing this song!

"Turn the World Around" 2nd Grade

This week in music class, the 2nd graders began learning a song called "Turn the World Around," which they will be singing in their "Spring Sing" concert on May 20th. We had a lot of fun watching the video of Harry Belafonte singing with Ms. Ritter's favorites--The Muppets! :) We figured out that like many African songs we have learned this year, it has a Call and Response form. We also talked about how this song is not in duple or triple meter, but it is instead in a mixed meter, which gives us an uneven beat and makes the song interesting. 

We hope you enjoy this video and singing along at home!

"Naranja Dulce" 1st Grade Song

The past two weeks, our 1st graders began learning a Spanish folk song called "Naranja Dulce" which means "sweet orange." We have had such a great time learning to sing the spanish words and figuring out what they mean. It was especially fun to see how many of our students speak Spanish or know someone who speaks Spanish and watch their faces light up as we sang :)

We also started talking about HARMONY and how it is when you have two or more parts in music that sound nice together. We began to sing the bass line chord roots and were able to sing independently while Ms. Ritter sings the melody of the song. I was so impressed with how quickly they picked up on this skill, which I told them, is not something that people expect 1st graders to be able to do!

Here are the slides that we have been using in class in case you want to practice them with your child at home. They will be singing this song at their concert at the end of May. Happy singing!