The best laid plans...

My biggest plan this week was to have 3rd grade rhythmic centers focused on syncopation. While I did get them started, they are off to a rough start due to a sick child at home. My second group will be a day behind so I'll have to extend it a bit more than I had planned. So far, so good though.

I thought maybe I would highlight the technology center that I used for 3rd grade's practice. I did a homemade I Spy PowerPoint and it's not only great for music practice, but it's a great vocabulary and math skill builder. The initial home screen looks like this (but without the watermark of course):

It's not the best picture, but I just took objects from around the house (it helps to have overstuffed toy bins and overflowing craft drawers to select from!) and placed them on a white background. I'm not great with a camera and my professional photographer husband was not available that day, so I had to play around with different places around the house. Luckily, we have some great skylights upstairs and I was able to get some decent natural lighting. After some editing in Photoshop, I got a pretty clear image to use. (If you'd like to use my image, feel free to contact me in the comments and I'd be glad to send you the image without the watermark!)

After inserting the image into my first slide, I prepared several other slides containing my syncopated rhythms. Then I went back to the first slide and I drew a grid of squares on top, using the draw tool. It looked like this when I was done drawing them and making sure the boxes were clear, with no line colors:

After that, it's just a matter of hyperlinking. If you've never hyperlinked before, it's a great tool to make a PowerPoint interactive. In fact, I know PowerPoint gets a bad reputation these days but I find it to be an incredible tool in the classroom.....just not for presentations. I hardly ever use it as such. Anyway, right click on your first box and select "Hyperlink". In the next dialog box, select "Place in this Document" and then "Slide 2" (if that's the slide you want it to go to). Do this to every box, and make sure each box is linked a different slide (Slide 3, Slide 4, Slide 5, etc.).

Here's the trick though....you need a way for the kids to get BACK to the "home" screen after they are done reading their rhythm.  Easiest way....insert a clipart of a house on your first rhythm slide and hyperlink it. Except this time, select "Place in this Document" and "First Slide."  Copy and paste it to every slide except your home screen. If you want to get fancy, insert a text box with the words, "Go home" under the house. :)

Now you have your own interactive game! As far as it being a vocabulary/math game as well, come up with questions like "I spy with my eye....a polygon in a primary color," or "....a vowel,"....or "....one of your five senses," or ...."half of 10."  

3rd Graders spying a form of transportation

(Just a note - when we play in a group, I sing "I spy with my eye" on the solfa that we are concentrating on (drm or low la for example) and they have to echo me before I say the clue, but for the centers, I simply made little cards with a detective on the front.)

Let me know if you have any questions by leaving me a comment!

Thoughts on Second Grade Rhythmic Centers

Since my post about my centers was getting long and my day was being cut short by classes and an afternoon trip to the vet (have you ever taken a bearded dragon to the doctor? wacky stuff)....this is part two, my thoughts on how it went. Hopefully if anyone out there is reading and wanting to try this stuff, you won't make my mistakes or will make even better improvements on things that went well!

First of all, I have to just get it out: in many ways, I'm a control freak in the classroom. Yes, I said it. I know musicians are supposed to play well with others (ha ha, see what I did there?) and I do, but we also know how to pick up a conductor's baton and take charge. I had a hard time letting my students just go and do their thing on their own...that was so unsettling! This is something that "regular" classroom teachers have been doing all along, but it's not something that I'm accustomed to in my room due to the nature of my usual constraints. My main issue: I cringed each time I heard a wrong rhythm in the background. How do you deal with that? We can't possibly correct every one of them. I checked around at each station and guided but tried not to hover too much. The sound level of all the different activities at once was difficult to hear as well. And let's not even get into how they man-handled my handmade manipulatives....

Other than that, this particular grade level worked well with each other. That alone worried me and it was all surprisingly fine! I made careful groups ahead of time with the iPad app iDoceo and that really helped. I only ended up making one switch. I also plan on ordering some headphones and a 5-way splitter soon and adding a listening station next time. That will be some simple dictation perhaps?

This afternoon, I'm starting some third grade centers for practicing syncopation. The centers are very similar, just different rhythms (since they did not play these activities as second graders). Instead of Bad Apple on the projector though, they'll get an I Spy PowerPoint, and some writing practice.

Second Grade Rhythmic Centers

Is anyone else a bit afraid of centers for the music room like I am? :) With only 25 minutes, so much could go wrong....

I've never given centers a serious try in the music room before, but there are too many good ideas floating around the internet not to try them and give my kids more small group interactions. I started off slow with my second graders and the half note. Now that they're done, I can definitely say that some of it was successful and some of it can be improved for next time. (Also, please note that I tried to take action pictures, but I'm not the greatest iPad photographer.)

Since I can tell this is going to be ridiculously long, I'll just list and describe my five centers (I see my kids twice a week for 25 minutes each, so I knew that was about all we could reasonably handle in two lessons) and I'll reflect on the process in another day or so.

Center 1: Bad Apple
This was my technology center. In my district, we have projectors that work with a wireless BenQ pen (or wireless mouse, which is my preference). Throughout the year, I make interactive PowerPoints that often utilize hyperlinking. This particular one involved a screen full of apples to click on. Some apples reveal a "juicy" rhythm to read...some apples reveal a worm that eats your turn! The kids love this one and were happy that they didn't have to wait so long for a turn being in small groups.

Center 2: Musical Marble Composing

I went to the dollar store and purchased a million of those large flat clear gems from the craft aisle. I then cut vinyl stickers with a craft die-cut machine (more on that someday) and stuck them on the back. The kids then composed their own 4, 8 or 16 beat rhythms using quarter, eighth, quarter rest and half notes.



Center 3: Recycle It!
Again, a major score at the dollar store. My husband and I spotted some great miniature trash bins, just like the ones you put out on the curb. I stuck labels over them to change them to recycling bins, printed some water bottle clipart and put some 8 beat rhythms on the back. The kids took turns picking up bottles to read them and put them in their trash can. HOWEVER....if they picked one up that said, "Recycling Day - Empty your Bin," they lost all their bottles. They were excited at the game aspect of this one!

Center 4: "I have....Who has...?"
This is a pretty standard activity in the Kodaly classroom. I like this one a lot because it is a reading and listening challenge in one. I did have to sit down and play with the kids and model quite a bit though. (We had not played this one as a whole group in class.) That gave me a chance to hear them reading a bit closer though, of course!

Center 5: Oh Fiddlesticks!

This idea came from the internet somewhere, though I can't remember where! Kids take turns drawing sticks from the cup and reading their stick. If they get the tricky Fiddlestick though, they lose all their sticks! (Did you know you can dye plain popsicle sticks with food coloring? Guess who has popsicle sticks of every shade all over her house now? It helps with sorting sets of different rhythmic categories and I can see possibly mixing them to easily differentiate between my higher and lower level rhythmic readers. Ex: Student A picks only pink sticks and Student B picks only green sticks.)

Does anyone use these games or activities in their classroom? If so, do you have ideas to extend them further?

An intro of sorts

During my first teaching job, I had a generous budget that I could share with my co-teacher. I was absolutely clueless as to what I needed (and was too overwhelmed to figure out what I even wanted) but I can remember ordering a colorful poster with the James M. Barrie quote,

"If you cannot teach me to fly, teach me to sing." 

To this day, it's my go-to quote. Birds have even become my classroom theme. "Why do you have birds everywhere?" the kids ask me. "They are animals who sing and that's what we do in the music room," I tell them. We sing, we make music and we have a good time doing it.

I'll admit...I haven't quite decided the direction of this blog. I am a K-5 Kodály-trained teacher for one of the greatest districts in the world, so I would love to discuss folk dancing, solfa and rhythm lessons, and music teaching strategies in general. I love all things technology and incorporating them in my classroom. I have a great passion for teaching technology to others so I'm sure some of that will be here. At the same time, I love crafting and making fun manipulatives for my students so I'm sure I'll share those too. Whatever goes, I guess!