Snail, snail....I mean, Snowflake snowflake!

As you can see, I'm trying to make up for all the blogging that I haven't done over the last few months and I'm on a roll! This is a perfect activity for these winter months and it's a familiar melody to the little ones.

I learned Snowflake, Snowflake a long time ago and I'm trying to remember who taught it to me! I'm going to have to ask a few friends from my Kodály levels if they remember learning this song from one of our teachers or if I learned it from a colleague. I will update if I get some answers. (I did Level I in 2001 where I probably would have learned this song, so my memory is fuzzy. I don't have a master copy either so it must have just been one of those songs learned in a lesson. Maybe someone made it up. Again, I'll have to ask around!)

The lyrics and solfa are on the slides in the activity, but basically, it's the same melody and rhythm as Snail, Snail with these words:

It's simple, but fun and catchy and the kids love this one! We play a movement game of sorts where we float and drift around like lovely, gentle snowflakes....at the end, of course, we freeze! The most frozen snowflake gets to come to the front and choose the next frozen snowflake and then go back into the game. There's no elimination....it's just fun movement and singing. We don't usually sing it very fast....maybe that's because I'm used to soft, gentle snowfall here in Texas. :) Though I will admit, if I feel like a particular class can handle it, we will have a blizzard in the forecast and sing faster for a different tempo practice. Usually the blizzard passes over pretty quickly though.

If you have a projector but not a SmartBoard, this one is especially for you. I chose PowerPoint for this activity because of the animations and action settings that I needed to use....Google Slides just doesn't have the options I needed. I have basically set it up to give an assessment for reading la, so and mi on the staff and it won't advance until they get the answer (out of three options) correct.

So head over to the link below and download it! I put the activity directions and leading questions in the slide notes at the bottom. If you read over those and then press Play to practice it, I think it'll be pretty clear. I don't write all directions directly on my slides because I don't want to just read from the screen. :)

Snowflake, Snowflake Activity Link