Monthly Music News : March News

Kindergarten News

This is a great month to study Marches. Therefore, we studied "The Royal March of the Lions" by Camille Saint-Saens, "The Noble Duke of York" who had 10,000 men and "The Ants Go Marching". Our focus was to try to maintain a steady beat in time with the music. Was it a slow march? A fast march?
We also looked at dynamics. What would the roar of a lion look and sound like? Did the month of March come in like a lion or a lamb?

Crescendo
St. Patrick's Day is fun to celebrate. We sang the following songs to enjoy some Irish Music: Michael Finnegan and A Rig-a-Jig-Jig. These songs helped us to focus on different tempos such as walking versus skipping music and slow versus fast.

We continued our study of music comparatives. Fast and slow was demonstrated through the story of The Tortoise and the Hare, The Old Gray Cats are Sleeping (a game), and Engine, Engine. For the train song, we had 3 groups that rotated through stations: a drumming group who set the tempo of the train, an Orff group who provided accompaniment and a train with an engineer and student cars. It was a lot of fun!
The season of Spring was highlighted with a look at the cuckoo bird.We listened to The Cuckoo Bird by Camille Saint-Saens and the played a game with cuckoo birds popping out behind a tree. We identified the cuckoo bird sound as so-mi and showed it with our hand-signs.

Rhythm is the way the words go (or tas and titis) and the beat is a steady pulse. Our focus this month was differentiating between rhythm and beat in groups of 4 while studying simple songs and rhymes. I was looking for cooperation among group members, using time wisely, accurate body percussion and eye contact with their audience.
Try asking your child if they can demonstrate rhythm and/or beat with body percussion (i.e. snap, pat, clap) with a well-known nursery rhyme or simple song that they know well.Or, ask your child to perform a 4-beat rhythm pattern and have you echo it. (I.E. Can you clap this rhythm ta, ta titi ta? You would answer: I can clap this rhythm and echo it)
For melodic development, we are using 3 pitches: so-mi and la. Students played the melody to 15 Miles on the Orff instruments using the notes A, G and E.
After learning the poem, "I See You", they partnered up with a friend to create a melody by using the 3 notes: la-so-mi. Then they presented their songs. It was great to see them be composers just like Franz Joseph Hadyn who we studied last month.

March is a great month to study... the march! The students had a lot of fun listening to orchestral versions of: Radetsky's March and March of the Boyars where we looked at dynamics, tempo, mood, instruments and form.
Students also enjoyed studying Irish Music this month. We did a movement activity in a large circle to the piece "Rakes of Mallow". We also used spoons and drums to accompany an Irish reel dance called "The Little Beggarman". Last, we watched the Irish Rovers perform"Hi, Ho the Rattlin Bog"; a cumulative (or add on song) that is fun to view but a little hard on the eyes. If you would like to watch it, please check out the following link. https://youtu.be/O1tIYSi7Oec