Anchor Chart Freebie

With larger-scale printing getting cheaper and cheaper, nice anchor charts are all the rage on Pinterest it seems! Sure, you could do the old-fashioned, authentic "write and draw your own on a flipchart" but for those of us who despise our own handwriting, this is a daunting task. I don't mind jotting notes on the classroom board, but if it's going to go on my wall long-term and it's in my handwriting, it's going to be typed up and printed out nicely!

I spent a lot time of gathering, admiring and borrowing ideas from here and there and finally put a few together in my own personal styles. My first priority was a chart comparing beat and rhythm. For some reason, this has always been tricky. These words seem to be blend together in a lot of kids' brains after a while. Unless the student has a solid memory for the definitions, they seem to always be looking around for the answer or how exactly to explain it.

So my version is below.

If you'd like to download it and print it out yourself, click here. (For personal use only, please!) This one is formatted for 11x17 printing at Staples for under $2 if I remember correctly.

Enjoy!

Rhythm Ice!

Has the cold weather hit your area yet? In true Texas style, the temperature dropped to the low 40's with cold, cold rain and I broke out the heavy coats (and went to the store for my son who grew out of last season's coat).....and then it warmed back up enough for a regular jacket. As for the next week and half, who knows? It'll probably snow! Typical Texas. :)

(Is everyone in the north laughing at me that I think the low 40's is super cold? What can I say, I was raised in tropical south Texas wearing shorts nearly year-round!)

Anyway, my son and I were shopping last night and his comment ("Maybe it'll ice over and school will be cancelled!") reminded me of a favorite rhythmic activity in my classroom. During most of the year, I call them Rhythm Gems or Marbles, but in winter (and especially after the movie Frozen came out), they are known as Rhythm Ice:

I have a ton of each type organized into their own boxes and can pull out the appropriate types according to the grade and lesson. I love these little stacking boxes that you can find at your local craft store! I made the labels on my Silhouette machine.

I always use them with some laminated beats in whatever meter needed for the lesson. In this previous post, my students had been practicing half note (and then the student had to trade with a friend and read someone else's composition) and I've also used them whole group. Here's another example that could be used with your younger groups who have learned quarter/eighth:

What's great about these is that the student clearly sees that one piece of rhythm "ice" belongs on one heartbeat when they are placing them. When you get to half note (as shown in the earlier post link), you simply show them how to put a blank rhythm ice piece as a placeholder.

If you're interested in purchasing some of these already made, visit my Etsy store! I have them for sale in groups by level and by individual rhythm as well. They are listed as Rhythm Gems in the store. (Laminated beats not included in purchase.)

Rhythm "Ice" or Gems - Individual Rhythms

Beginner Set - Quarter, 8th, "Z" and Rest

Intermediate Set - Half note, 16th, synCOpa

Advanced Set - 8th/16th, 16th/8th, Dotted quarter/eighth

popsicle stick dictation sets

As you can probably tell by now, I'm not blogging for the fame and fortune. :) I really do need to blog more often though....

I have been agonizing over my popsicle stick dictation sets for awhile now. Actually, I have been becoming downright disgruntled over these things over the last few years. Am I the only one? (Probably.) The beat-up baggies that won't zip closed....they get spilled when the kids return them to my drawer....the ones with holes....quite honestly, I usually just rezip each and every one of them as the (younger) kids bring them up to me because even when they looked and felt zipped, they weren't. Yes, I'm that teacher who likes supplies to be neat and organized. Yet somehow my room never looks like it...

I've been on the hunt for small secure boxes or better bags - anything - that could hold these things! They couldn't cost much either because I knew I'd probably be buying them on my own. (I have a generous budget, but I'm very impatient and like to have things immediately when I spot them!) Finally, I found these small pencil boxes online and loaded them with some great stuff for dictation! Forget the plain old wooden popsicle sticks....nope, not in my classroom! :) Here's what I've got in my sets:

• pre-colored popsicle sticks from Office Depot; I've used these to group kids: "Orange sticks, read your rhythm. Green sticks, read next." etc. 
• mega sticks, dyed pinkish-red (with food coloring) for beat bars 
• mini sticks dyed to match the regular sticks; these are for flags or for shorter bars (ti-tika or tika-ti type combos)
• white poker chips (found long ago in the Target dollar aisle) with the edges colored in Sharpie for half notes
• small wooden circles (found at the craft store or more recently, my home crafting stash) dyed to match the regular sticks; 
• black pipe cleaners for ties

Pic labeled with Skitch...very cool app!

Here's some examples of how they can be used:

I was worried that the boxes would take up a lot of room (the baggies are very compact, which is one nice thing about them) but here's how they look when they're all packed up in a box:

Not bad, huh? The kids are having a great time using them. And this music teacher is happy to throw away all those torn up, ragged ziplock bags!! (It's the little things in life, you know?)

STOMP

Have you ever thought about making music with brooms? Or with matchboxes? Or maybe a plastic bag? Did you ever look at a person walking on crutches and wonder what that crutch might sound like if you beat on it with drumsticks?

The musical geniuses of STOMP sure have.

My husband, son and I got a chance to see the show at the beautiful Bass Performance Hall in Fort Worth yesterday afternoon.

I feel so fortunate to live in an area where incredible venues like this are nearby. Even though I don't get out to see shows and performances often, I certainly enjoy it when the opportunity arises. In fact, funny story....I guess you could say I was so excited to see STOMP that I arrived a week early! I got my dates mixed up and we were over half-way to Fort Worth last Sunday when I double-checked the tickets. Oops....

I was so happy to share this experience with my son. He's almost 9 and has been to a small symphonic performance and a few local theater performances, but has never seen a major production like this. He was a bit grumpy about it at first because we wanted a million pictures (and most looked like this)....

...but was having a great time once it started. I asked what his favorite part was and he said there were too many to list. I have to agree. I was so happy to see we weren't the only parents with a child in the audience too. Though it is a two-hour program with no intermission, it's a perfect introduction to the Broadway musical scene. It's thrilling, entertaining, laid-back and downright fun. The production's take on music is so innovative...I've seen the DVDs many times in the classroom and I was still surprised by what I saw and heard. The talented cast blew me away! 

I wish I could put into words all the (new) lesson ideas going through my head at the moment based on body percussion and sound exploration but I'll have to add those as they develop into actual lessons. In the meantime, enjoy a great scene from the STOMP Live! DVD.

I'll be back in a day or two with some melodic centers that I just made (and I'm very excited to start with second grade) so check back for those. I also did some recordings of 3rd grade improvisations and I'll share that process this week too!

The Luck O' the Irish

Sometimes ideas strike at midnight. Literally. :)

I had planned out my lessons and had everything ready to go and then had a really rough time sleeping last night. I always revert to my night owl/late sleeper routine on long breaks so ending Spring Break did not go over well with my body's schedule. As I tossed and turned, I had a last-minute idea that ended up changing my plans a little bit and it worked out well this morning! I wish I had pictures, but it was a quick-paced lesson and I was in the middle of leading the action.

Anyway, I had already planned on having a gold coin/rainbow themed lesson to have a little fun with St. Patrick's Day today. I made pots of gold out of black cardstock and painted some leftover wooden circles that were in my craft bin. I had planned on using them for Kinder as high/low icons and for 3rd grade to earn as team points for reading syncopated rhythms.

But what came together nicely was the set-up and an add-on lesson plan for 2nd grade. They just finished a reading assessment for half note before leaving for Spring Break, but I decided to take it a step further this morning. I asked them to do some rhythm improvisation. I formed two rainbows using spots, with a large pot of gold in the middle and two smaller team pots at the end of each rainbow:

I sat in the middle with the large pot and had two team lines form down the middle. We practiced a few patterns (from the board) to the music (some Celtic/Irish folk music) and we had two rounds.

Round one: they could pick any pattern from the board to say, but they had to be ready when it was their turn. If they were ready and they could say it in rhythm with the music, they got a gold coin. They could travel down the rainbow and put it in their team's pot. (This put them at the end of the line nicely.)

Round two: the sneaky leprechaun stole their rhythms and now they had to improvise a pattern! If they could improvise a pattern using a half note, they earned another coin. If not, I usually gave them another chance at this one. They were really very good at it! Even "under pressure"! (And yes, most of them did make up different ones than the ones they said before.) I even challenged them to make up ones that were not on the board and I got some very creative answers.

Was it the luck o' the Irish? Or more likely, the amazing Feierabend workshop that I attended about a year ago with a very similar pirate-themed lesson that popped into my head and the translation just seemed to work?

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

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?