Can you believe we have reached the end of music classes? And that the school year is almost over?! I dearly wish we could have had this time to sing and make music together in person, but I am really looking forward to meeting you all next year! One final Music Listening piece for the school year. I thought this was a beautifully appropriate song to close us out. Pay special attention to the words Kermit is singing in this classic from the Muppets, "Rainbow Connection." Let's pretend we are giving our final performance of the year. Grab your parents and siblings if you want an audience as we sing and dance along to some of our favorite songs from this school year. Of course, we will start it all off with "Hello There! Let's start out with some of our silliest songs from way back when. Join me in singing "Down by the Bay," "Mr. Golden Sun," and "Apples and Bananas!" Let's all "Shine, Shine, Shine" like "Great Big Stars!"Can you remember the signs for "Great Big Stars?" Grab your percussion instruments as you sing and play along with "Knock the Cymbals." My goodness, we learned a lot of great, fun songs this year! Let's sing "Hi, Heidi, Ho" and "This Old Man." March along with our busy ant friends as we sing "The Ants Go Marching." "Put Your Hand in my Hand" is a beautiful song about friendship and accepting everyone around us as equals. That's an especially important message to remember in this crazy time! Have you figured out how to spell cat, sat, dog, and log? How about hippopotamus?! Give it a whirl as we sing "I Can't Spell Hippopotamus!" Let's close out the singing portion of out performance with "America!" And now we will finish our performance with our favorite dances, "Dinosaur Dance" and "Doin' the Penguin! Have a great summer, dear friends! I'll see you in September!
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Hello, my dears! Can you believe that we are almost finished with music for this school year?! Juts one more week left after this one. Let's start with listening to some beautiful music. This Csardas by Vittorio Monti is a beautiful piece of Romantic gypsy music performed on violin and piano. Let's begin singing. We will start, as always, with "Hello There!" and "The Solfege Song," followed by some Call & Response Solfege Practice. We learned a great silly song last week, "Hi Heid Ho!" Let's sing it again! We also added the song "The Ants Go Marching." Can you think of any other rhymes that this song could use? Like rhyming one with fun or two with hair turned blue? Let's add one more great American folk song: "This Old Man." I love the fun illustrations in this video! As always, let's finish with fun dance and do "The Dinosaur Dance" together! Two of the greatest, and most diverse, musical geniuses of our time collaborated on an album together in 1992, and the result was amazing. Bobby McFerrin is an African-American jazz vocalist who can do amazing things with his voice. (Your parents probably know "Don't Worry, Be Happy" one of his best-known songs.) Yo-Yo Ma is a Chinese born cellist who can do amazing things on the cello. Watch them perform a fun version of "Hush Little Baby." (And if you enjoy that and want to listen to some more, "Flight of the Bumblebee" and "Vocalise" are amazing performances!) You know what comes next! "Hello There!," "The Solfege Song," and then some Call and Response Solfege Practice! We have some new songs this week! The first one is called "Hi, Heidi, Ho!" and is super silly! Just have fun singing along. There are some call and response sections and parts where you sing all together. "The Ants Go Marching" is one of my favorite songs to sing with kids, and a great one for practicing rhyming words. See if you can come up with some rhyming words of your own to fit the song. Next week we will add some movement to it, although you can certainly practice marching in place as you sing this week! Let's sing "America" again this week. Try to see if you can sing it from memory. One of my favorite books about music, and a great introduction to the musical instruments, is "Zin, Zin, Zin, A Violin" by Lloyd Moss, with illustrations by Marjorie Priceman. Watch this read-along video, which includes clips of all the instruments playing "Ode to Joy." Which instrument is your favorite As promised, I have a new dance for you this week, to the song "Dinosaur Dance." This silly song has an A-B form, with a special little extra Coda at the end. Watch the introductory video to show you how to do the dance, and then we can dance it together! I would love to see videos of you doing it at home. Send them to [email protected]. I wanted to start this week with some music listening. I'm sure you are all quite familiar with the song "Let It Go!" from Frozen, but I bet you've never heard it played like this before! It is played by a group of (mostly) teenagers on both orchestra and traditional Chinese instruments. Blew me away! Let's get right into our lesson! Now we will do some Solfege practice with Call & Response singing. I will sing first and you will echo me. Make sure you are practicing doing your hand signs while you are singing. Before we start our singing time, I'd like to talk to you about PERCUSSION INSTRUMENTS. A percussion instrument is anything that we strike or hit to make a sound. In our music class, we have access to a lot of great percussion instruments, like drums, xylophones, egg shakers, triangles, and more. But right now, we are all at home and probably don't have things like that, which means we get to be creative! So look around the house and see what you can find. Here are some ideas I had for common household objects that could be used as percussion instruments:
You can watch this video for inspiration. All right, let's do some music making now. Starting with "America." We learned a new song last week called "Great Big Stars." This week we will be adding American Sign Language (ASL) signs to it. Sing through it once so you can remember the song, then watch the ASL videos. Let's sing "Knock the Cymbals" again! Now it's time to grab the percussion instrument you found around your house and we will play a simple rhythm as we sing the song again. This video walks you through the percussion part, and then you can try playing along as you sing the song again. Can you spell hippopotamus yet? Let's keep singing "I Can't Spell Hippopotamus" and see if you can get it down. Or at least get the CVC words down! Now let's finish up our time this week with some dancing! Let's see how well you remember the moves to "Can't Stop the Feeling!" I have a special new dance to teach you next week that goes with a song about dinosaurs! I bet you have figured out our routine by now, so let's get right into making music! We will start with "Hello There!" and "The Solfege Song." Now let's put our solfege skills to the test with some Call & Response singing. Make sure you are echoing me and using your hand signs! Today we will start our singing time with our Patriotic song. I bet you are getting really good at "America" by now! "Shine, Shine, Shine" is the song we added last week. Let's sing it together again! Now we are ready for some new songs. "Great Big Stars" is another opportunity to practice our call & response singing skills with a lovely, gentle melody. "Knock the Cymbals" is a short, simple song to sing, which means we can have some fun by bringing in percussion instruments next week. Make sure you are super comfortable singing it so we can have some fun with it! The last song for today is pretty silly, and great for practicing some of our CVC words, like hat, cat, top, etc. It's called "I Can't Spell Hippopotamus!" Can you?! This is a song we would have performed in our final concert of the year- even though we can't do that this year, we can still have a lot of fun learning the song together! I know you all had a ton of fun dancing to "Doin' the Penguin." So for this week I have a new song for you to dance with that I think you may be familiar with. Have fun dancing to "Can't Stop the Feeling." As always, I would love to see your dances. You can email them to me at [email protected]. Welcome back, 1st Graders! Let's sing our Welcome Song- "Hello Friends!" Let's continue warming up our voices and brains with "The Solfege Song." Now we are going to practice our solfege singing with some Call & Response. I'll sing first, and you will echo me. Now we are all warmed up and ready to sing! I like to repeat songs for a few weeks before moving on to new material. This lets you guys feel comfortable with the songs and allows us to bring in different elements, like adding instruments, dances, and more. So let's start again with "Down By the Bay!" followed by "Apples and Bananas!" Now rise and shine and sing about "Mr. Golden Sun." Sing about how great friendship is in "Put Your Hand in My Hand." Next week we will be adding some movement to this song, so make sure you are really comfortable with it. Finally, a new song!!! "Shine, Shine, Shine" is a great song that was written by Carol Johnson was a great American singer and songwriter who is particularly known for singing about peace and togetherness. This one has a fun Call & Response section- you will take the part that echoes the soloist. Let's finish our singing time with our Patriotic song, "America." Did you have fun "Doin' the Penguin?" Let's do it "one more time!" I would still love to see videos of you and your family dancing and singing along. You can email them to me or save them to this Dropbox.
I love to start class by making music right away, so join me in singing our Welcome Song- "Hello There!" You will be echoing me for most of the song, but at the end we will sing "But we're all here together again!" Excellent! This is another song I like to sing at the beginning of every class, because it helps us to learn and sing our solfege! It's called "The Solfege Song." This one has some fun motions, so join me! Now let's do some solfege practice. Repeat after me! Are you ready to sing some songs together? Let's go! This is one of my daughter's favorite songs of all time- in fact, she requests her dad sing it to her every night, and they try to outdo each other making up the silliest rhymes they can! "Down by the Bay" is a great song for us to continue using our call-and-response (or echo) skills. During the chorus "Down by the bay..." you will echo the soloist; when we get to the verse "Did you ever..." sing all together! Do you like to eat apples and bananas? Me too! Here is a silly song we can sing together while we explore using long vowel songs. Enjoy some "Apples and Bananas!" This is a favorite song that my kids loved singing with me when they were a little younger- "Mr. Golden Sun." When you are familiar with the song, try adding the dance that they do along with it. Friends are an important part of our life. I know you are all missing seeing your friends at school every day right now, but let this song remind you that we don't have to look or think or be the same to be united in friendship. Go ahead and sing along with "Put Your Hand in My Hand." We will add motions to this in the future. The last song we will sing together is the great American Patriotic song "America." I want every student in our school to be able to sing this together. (Make sure you stick around to the end- we have a great activity that you can do with your whole family!) Our last activity is a fun dance you can do with the whole family! Grab your mom and dad or your siblings, and boogie down by "Doin' the Penguin!" (The audio file is below.) I would love to see pictures or videos of you "Doing the Penguin" and share some clips on my YouTube channel. If you would like to do that you can email your version to me or add it to this Dropbox folder.
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