It's been all songs and games in the music room so far this month. In September the big focus is on rhythm and beat. We've been playing name games that challenge students to improvise a rhythm and create a movement using their name. Both grades have been singing songs, chanting rhymes and this week students are reviewing their ability to recognize and decode the rhythm patterns in those activities.  

Grade 2 students have been introduced to a partner dance/mixer called Welcome All My Friends which supports beat awareness, pitch development,and singing skills. In the coming weeks this will provide a wonderful way to practice interacting socially as well as musically with friends. 

Grade 3 students have been learning how to hold and play hand drums as well reviewing their mallet skills on the barred instruments. We read and sang along to a beautiful book called My Heart Fills with Happiness by Monique Gray Smith.  

Please reach out to me at estover@email.medfield.net with any questions. I am always happy to hear from you.

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​The music room curriculum is very game-based as we know that students learn best when they are having fun. Ask your grade two student to show you Bluebird, Bluebird that helps reinforce steady beat as well as the sol-mi-la pitch set or  Welcome All My Friends that helps prepare the concept of high and low pitch. Ask your grade 3 student to show you how to play Sasha (and count to three in Russian) that introduces tempo as a way to add energy to a piece of music or a challenging Name Game that challenges students to use their name and something they like to do to improvise a rhythm!

We've been playing with little chunks of melody in grade 2 for a while now - just three note combinations of pitch. We use solfege in the classroom and students are now very familiar with do re and mi and their various combinations!  If I sing a certain pattern without using the solfege names, students can tell me which pattern I sang. I thought it would be interesting to let students compose with those melodic chunks and to see what they would come up with.

This video clip is a wonderful window into how the students' are thinking as they compose. You can hear them discussing their choices and trying out different ideas - it's one of my favorite moments from my classroom this year as the students display an authentic appreciation for patterns and melodic direction in their composition.

We've been studying the instrument families of the orchestra in second grade. I love to find examples of beautiful music that features individual instruments. This week we are studying the woodwind family and the oboe. Students did a lesson on mirroring in movement and worked with a partner to respond to the musical elements of the music they were listening to. Students were instructed to take turns as leaders. I chose to use the tune 'Gabriel's Oboe' by Ennio Moricone. The movement created by these young second grade boys left me speechless in its expressiveness. 

Our grade three students are coming along nicely with their recorder skills. They now know four pitches - B A G and low E. There are so many songs we can play with just these four pitches. Adding the low E helps us to play songs in both major tonality as well as minor tonality. The students still need lots of practice time to get the right combination of airflow and finger coordination. I find one of the best ways to do this is to set students up in small groups to work on a group composition project.

The small group composition project allows students to practice their instrument with the support and help of their peers as well as lots of opportunities to try out different fingerings and pitches as they work together to come up with a melody. The opportunity to play solo within a small group helps students to hear what they play - not always possible when the whole class plays together. Having auditory feedback is so important to helping students to adjust their playing so that they sound like what they think or want to sound like! Playing in a small peer group also feels safer to many students and is a great way to build confidence.

In the photos below students are using word cards of varying syllables, therefore rhythms to come up with a four measure blues song.  I can't wait to hear the finished products when we come back from winter break!

On February 6th Wheelock school participated in Global Play Day - a day dedicated to letting students simply play without any adult structure imposed on their play. I was very curious to see what that might look like in the music room. I put out many of my manipulatives that I use for rhythmic creation and composition for students to explore as well as my puppet tree and dress up box. The most popular station by far was the puppet tree with the dress up box coming in a close second!  Students loved creating stories with the puppets and adding props to the puppets. In several classes I observed groups organizing the puppets into a band and assigning them each instruments.  It was so much fun to watch their creativity take flight in ways that I could not have predicted. I also really enjoyed the opportunity to observe students engaged in play and to notice their social interactions. Having a different lens with which to view students was really helpful for me to come to a deeper understanding of each student's personality and interests. Similarly,  being invited into their play and games of make-believe was not only fun but a privilege.

The bedrock of Dr. Gordon's theory is that, contrary to the talent theory, we all possess innate ability to be musical, albeit at different aptitudes. Our ability to reach our innate potential as musical beings lies in our exposure to and interactions with music from infancy, much as a young child learns to speak its mother tongue. It is through these many varied interactions with music that we begin to understand music's structures and syntax and develop the ability to engage in music with understanding. It is this foundational premise of Dr. Gordon's work that inspires me to dedicate myself to creating rich, playful and engaging musical experiences for young children. 

The first chapter of Dr. Gordon's book is full of wonderful analogies and gems of wisdom that draw frequent comparisons between language and music. "Sound itself is not music. Sound becomes music through audiation, when, as with language, we translate sounds in our mind and give them meaning." Dr. Gordon uses the term audiation to describe the particular way that we engage cognitively with music, that implies active, multi-faceted interaction with music. "Audiation is the process of assimilating and comprehending (not simply rehearsing) music momentarily heard performed or heard sometime in the past." Dr. Gordon sees the primary role of the music educator as nurturing musical cognition or audiation from a young age.  ​