Listening Journals in 5th Grade General Music

As I've been teaching in a new district I have the opportunity to use an iPad and Apple TV for instruction. After I took my graduate level ethnomusicology course I decided that I need to expose my students to different genres of music and music from different timelines. Even with the National Music Standards I know we all struggle with making listening a core part of our instruction. With that being said my "bell ringer" activity begins with a brief discussion of a piece I'm going to have them listen to and laid the foundation for things to listen and watch for in the video.

After watching the video I have a Google Form created for a listening journal. Since these students are in 5th grade I'm making more of a worksheet with questions regarding the music like "Is it vocal or instrumental? Who wrote it? What is a conductor? Composer? Did you like it or not? Why?" These answers may range from a multiple choice answer to a two sentence response. I want to integrate good reading and writing strategies into my classes so that students may get literacy practice without having to know they are getting this practice.

To create this form I access Google Drive, hover over Create, and go down to form. From there I can create a form from a template and go for it. From there I go to the tool bar and click view live form. This will show you the screen the students view. From there I create a QR code that our students can scan with an app called Qrafter. To get that code, I did an online search and found a QR generator. I would copy the URL from the live form and put that into the generator. From there I have a picture (QR Code) that I can print off or project on a screen/board.

Students know to access this through their Google Emails and when they are finished they may submit responses. These responses are sent to the owner of the form and I can separate by class into different Google Sheets. It's great! My students ask if we're doing the activity or not today!

Activities done so far - Radioactive Cover by Pentatonix, Sleep by Eric Whitacre (Virtual Choir 2), and The Star-Spangled Banner performed by the US Armed Forces Academy from the Superbowl. This is an activity that I'm excited to do and thoroughly enjoy getting my students exposed to different types of music that they probably wouldn't go out and listen to on their own. 

Aboriginal Music

It's been a long time without posting. I am currently in an Ethnomusicology course as part of my masters program. Here I figured I should share some videos/teaching tools for different musics of different cultures. This week one of the cultures studied is the music of the Aboriginal tribes found in Austrailia. Here are some videos related to this type of music.

Didjeridu - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sdaYobdoWo

How to play the didjeridu - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NfZLiSMmDk

Aboriginal Dancing - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rspN1MUcIOk&feature=related

When introducing a new culture to a group of students, I made sure to discuss that culture differences will be apparent, but we shouldn't dwell on them. The moment someone makes fun of, or shows disrespect, we stop watching and do a different activity.

Jazz!!

Jazz is full blown in Kindergarten and First Grade. We have recently listened to the book The Jazz Fly by Matthew Golub. The fly is asking farm animals how to get to town where the jazz club is located! He gets some help and saves the day by using both scat syllables and the sounds of the farm animals. We got to watch a live video of Ella Fitzgerald perform some scat and watch a string bass player! Coming up we'll learn about Nancy the Gnat and her saxophone. We will read a story about Charlie Parker and watch some videos of his playing. We'll also hear from Hoot the owl on Sesame Street! We are so excited to learn about jazz, the American musical art form!

Peter and the Wolf Resource

I'm preparing to teach about instruments, instrument families, and the piece Peter and the Wolf. Here's a link for a video of David Bowie introducing the instruments and the story!

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xmbg64_david-bowie-narrates-disneys-peter-and-the-wolf_music

Wrapping Up the Year

Here's a look at what we'll be doing in Kindergarten through 5th Grade this week!

Kindergarten - Learning about jazz, book of interest - The Jazz Fly by Matthew Golub

1st Grade - Continuing a conversation about jazz from last year - The Jazz Fly by Matthew Golub

2nd Grade - Learning about Sergei Prokofiev, and the instruments used in Peter and the Wolf

3rd Grade - Recorder Karate Pretest and introduction to recorders

4th Grade - Mr. Miller (band director) will be talking to students about the band program and give more information about the different instruments in band.

5th Grade - Wrapping up world music with North America! Starting today with the music of the Native Americans. Students will learn which tribes were indigenous to which parts of the nation. We will continue to learn about Pow Wows and the uses of music in these groupings.

More excitement to come! 

Saint-Saen Danse Macabre

I found this great resource for Danse Macabre by Saint-Saen. This elementary teacher does a really great job at breaking down specific themes. Here she breaks down the "dance party" that is happening with skeletons in a grave yard. Pretty sweet!! This was a great way to also teach different instruments in the orchestra.

Here's the link Mrs. Burritt's site - http://www.scsvt.org//site/Default.aspx?PageID=716

Here's the video I have use to share the piece with my students.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71fZhMXlGT4

Dead Dude of January

As you read my title you may be slightly confused, but instead of a composer of the month I teach about a Dead Dude of the Month. It's funny seeing the reactions of my students and even their parents when we talk about our dead dudes. The composers they have come to know and some may even say love are: J. S. Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, Tchaikovsky, and most recently in January we learned about Beethoven.

Ludwig van Beethoven was a prolific composer and most of us recognize that. Thanks to technology and the power of YouTube I was able to teach a considerable amount on this fantastic composer. To give some history we really focused on his symphonies, and his different musical periods. Beethoven wrote in both the Classical and Romantic Periods, which seemed like a concept I wouldn't be able to get across, but it totally worked! I also talked about his early, middle, and late symphonies in terms of composition.

The first symphony discussed was Beethoven's 3rd the "Eroica". I showed a YouTube clip of an orchestra playing and we discussed who it was written for? Did it sound more Classical or Romantic? Was it from Beethoven's early, middle, or late period? Being his 3rd and the students knew that he wrote 9, they answered it was more Classical and therefore belonged in his early period.

Beethoven's 3rd Symphony "Eroica" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InxT4S6wQf4

Next we talked of Beethoven's 5th, in which he started losing his hearing. The really liked this one, mainly because they recognized it. The major theme was discussed - the "short, short, short, long". Now was really helps demonstrate this is a sweet YouTube video I found that is almost like a video game playing his 5th. The students could easily follow and see the differences between high voices and low voices (instruments). This video allowed for discussion about why there are different colors - they represent different instruments. We also could see crescendos and decrescendos easily.

Beethoven's 5th Symphony - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRgXUFnfKIY

While we took a break from symphonies my friend Jessica Nilles, a piano performance and pedagogy major at Oklahoma, Skyped with my classes. We all know how technology can be, so we listened to her play two different pieces by Beethoven, piano sonatas, one from his early period and one from his late. Because the quality of our video wasn't the best she was gracious enough to record the pieces and give a little shout out to us in the comments! Woot!!

Here they are for your enjoyment:
Beethoven Sonata Op. 2/3 Mvt. 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zic4cxgBEnY
Beethoven Sonata 110 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEZ4ys3O5JA

To wrap things up for Beethoven we listened and viewed a recording on his 9th Symphony. This one features a quartet, representing each voice part and a choir behind the orchestra. This is unique because it's his only symphony with a choir and he was entirely deaf at this moment.

Here is the video for that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdWyYn0E4Ys

Special thanks to Jessica Nilles for the videos! Please use these videos to help expose everyone to Beethoven's music. Thanks!!

Noteflight - is way better than I could have imagined!

Recently I took a Technology in Music Education class as part of my Masters program. I had used MuseScore and Noteflight, but only in small bits. My musical colleague Kayla Schmitz has been using it with her students and suggested that I really start using it more. I did this for my high schoolers! It has been great. The site is below. I inputted "April is in my Mistress' Face" by Thomas Morley. Now, like many others, I have piano skills, but it's nice to get out from behind the piano and direct. Noteflight allows students the opportunity to view my piece (that I have semi-transcribe into Noteflight), they can also select specific parts to isolate to aid in part singing. I have found that students can lead their own sectionals - without having to be a piano player!! Woot!!

The free subscription to Noteflight only allows 10 scores, so Kayla suggested that I export to Music XML which allows this to be opened in either Finale, Sibelius, or MuseScore. MuseScore is a free music notation system download. One can also download to a MIDI file so the student could basically have a mp3 version of the piece, and so can the director so they can continue to direct. This allows the teacher to delete the score from Noteflight and opens up a spot for another selection.

Noteflight: http://www.noteflight.com

MuseScore: http://www.musescore.org

Composer Birthdays!

As a general music teacher I think composer/musician birthdays are really cool and fun to share with my students! Here's a link to a pdf version of Composer's Calendar - http://www.musick8.com/PDF/ComposersCalendar2014.pdf