Beginning Belts for Recorder

It's recorder time!! My 4th grade classes have been playing for two weeks now. We have been working on fundamentals and playing with a pretty, soft sound. I've also been crazy about articulation. I don't know why but a "fwah" attack drives me insane!

I am doing a couple things differently this year in order to reinforce all these great fundamental habits and really motivate the students. First, like recorder karate, we have 3 beginning belts: Black and Yellow striped, Pink and Sparkly.

Black and Yellow: "B Belt"
Hold a B with a soft, pretty sound for 20 counts with left hand on top and good posture. We practice a breathing exercise every time they come to music up to 24 counts.

Pink: Tonguing Belt
Tongue 4 notes in a row with a tah attack on each one

Sparkly: First solo
Play Hot Cross Buns for the class. I make my students leave their recorders in the classroom until they can play a song as a class. It is a great motivating tool and keeps them from going home and reinforcing bad habits.

Here is a picture of my recorder with the belts attached. I use pipe cleaners and they work like magic. The kids can get them on easily and they stay on! For the B belt, I just twisted yellow and black together. My fifth grade class came up with pink for tonguing. Everyone has gotten a kick out of that. And of course, sparkly is the most exciting belt.

Second, during class I am watching for students who are putting forth great effort and doing the fundamentals well. When I see or hear something great, I give the student a ticket. (Those carnival ride tickets...2000 on a roll for 4 bucks) They write their name on it and place it in the box. At the end of the six weeks, I will draw out x number of tickets and we are having an "Ice Cream Sundae Party."

As a review of fundamentals and a ticket opportunity, I sat in front of the class and performed things wrong, like posture, left over right, breathing, tonguing, etc. I asked the class to figure out what I was doing wrong and when they knew, raise their hand. If the person I called on got it correct, they got a ticket. Every hand in the room was up!

Carnival of the Animals Listening Tickets

Last year, my third grade classes were split by semester. This year we have year long classes with 3rd grade, but they are HUGE!

The good thing is that I can revisit Carnival of the Animals! The librarian and I have decided to do art activities with 3rd grade (because our art teacher travels to the high school after lunch) and I am incorporating that into my Carnival of the Animals unit with 3rd grade. This also coincides with their field trip to the zoo!

As an intro to each lesson, I have decided to play the piece and have the students make a prediction about the animals that is being depicted.

You can get the tickets HERE.

Fossils has a special ticket asking for the name of a familiar song. These tickets are included in the PDF.

Football Rhythms

In 5th grade, I have a room full of boys! I mentioned in an earlier post about playing the rhythm football game. Everyone loves this game! It is definitely worth the 3 bucks! As an additional activity for 5th grade, I created a word rhythm matching worksheet with NFL teams.

I let my classes work with a partner to sound out the teams and match them with the rhythms. My 5th graders are especially interested in college teams so I added a page for them to figure out the rhythm of their favorite college teams.

You can get the PDF file HERE.

Sail for Boomwhackers

My 3rd graders are loving boomwhackers right now and so am I! These things are one of my favorite classroom instruments! This summer I added some additional tubes to my collection and now have 6 sets. That seems to be enough to accommodate my largest classes of 24 students. That being said, having more boomwhackers means I can write new songs!

Last year, we played "Somebody That I Used to Know" and everyone enjoyed playing a pop song. So, last week I arranged "Sail" by Awolnation for boomwhackers and we started working on it. The boomwhacker part is the chordal accompaniment and I play the melody on the piano. I did have to transpose the piece because I don't have chromatic notes so we can't play with the recording but everyone seemed to like hearing it on the piano.

I've found when teaching boomwhackers to younger students it is easier to group them and have them play by color. That is how I arranged this piece. Group 1 is A minor, Group 1+ is the A minor chord with D, Group 2 is G major and Group 3 is C major. Then I added the group numbers to the rhythmic notation. To my surprise, this was INCREDIBLY EASY to teach, even the group 1 to 1+ change! They picked it up with no problems.

Just like the groups below, I have the students sit in their groups in a line facing the smartboard. This is easy for them to see when it is their turn to play. The next page in the file is the rhythm with the group numbers. You can download it HERE.

Finally, here is a short clip of a 5th grade class demonstrating this piece. We finished early and they were interested in learning it! I didn't have enough students in the class to fill out the entire chord (they are split between music and library for the semester) but you can still hear the general idea.

Melodic Dictation

So far this year, fourth graders are building skills for playing the recorder. Our recorders should be here next week! We have worked on rhythm and rhythmic dictation and last week we started melodic dictation. Our focus is learning B, A and G this year.

Last year, my first recorder class ever, did really well learning B, A and G on the recorder but many of them struggled to correlate the notes on the staff with the notes on the recorder. So, to fix that, we have worked hard learning about the staff.

My first activity was using Mr. E's Musical Apartment to teach B (Bad Boy), A (Always Awful, the ghost) and G (Good Guy). I drew the characters from the book and laminated them with magnetic tape on the back so they stick to the white board staff. The kids love these characters and have no trouble remembering their names.

We then talked about how Bad Boy and Good Guy have to go to the right apartment or else people would confuse them for each other and Good Guy doesn't want to be confused for Bad Boy.

I used words like BAG, GAB, AB, GAG, BAA to discuss how we read music, left to right. I used the characters to help the students write the notes in the correct order. In BAG, Bad Boy came home first then the ghost was awake, then Good Guy came home. That seemed to help and keep them from stacking the notes when they wrote them.

In my first activity, the students were paired up with a xylophone, a clipboard with a dry erase staff and marker. I would give them the order of the notes and they would write the letter names on the correct lines or spaces. I only used B, A and G. They worked together to write them out and then we played they notes on the xylophone.

To make it harder, I played a pattern on my xylophone and they had to figure it out and write it out on the staff. They did so well with this and really enjoyed it!

Last week (and continuing lessons this week), we all had a dry erase staff. I gave them letters to write down in the correct place and the first correct answer won a prize. My classes love this game! I also threw in some melodic dictation patterns, too.

Here you can find a pdf of my rhythmic dictation worksheet and melodic dictation staff. I put these papers in a page protector and attach them to a clip board to create a dry erase board. They work great!!

In order to connect both the note names and the rhythms we played Rhythm Football. I saw this on Pinterest and bought it from Teacher's Notebook. The kids loved the game! When the scored a touchdown, they earned 6 points and in order to earn the extra point, they had to write B, A or G on the staff.

Classroom Tour

I think I am finally done with my classroom for this year! It was so much easier the second time around!

Here are some pictures!
 

First, my new curtains! I reused some sheer panels from last year and made 2 panels from fabric we found at Wal-Mart. The valence is actually a vinyl table skirt that we found at a going out of business sale! It already had the peel and stick feature so all we had to do was cut it off to fit the window.

The ukulele cart is now between the windows. I added a vinyl sticker that my husband bought for me. Last year, I had an old tv on a wooden cart there. After an entire year of not using it, I gifted it to another teacher in need. So, I had a big open space to fill this year.

This was on the first day getting back into my room. Thanks to Pinterest, I am using book covers on the backs of my chairs to house pencils, expo markers and erasers. I think that will save time when transitioning between activities.

Also, the cabinets I covered in a scene-setter background last year are now serving as an additional bulletin board. I covered them with a vinyl tablecloth and used magnetic tape to attach my border! Very Easy!!

Thanks to Cara at Miscellaneous Me for the anchor charts! These are so great and fit my classroom perfectly. You can get them from her blog here.

 My piano will work so much better here! BUT, I needed wheels so I could roll it out. The scooters were just for moving purposes but it gave me a great idea....

Furniture movers! I found these at Big Lots for $9.00! And they are the perfect size! When I looked at an actual piano mover/roller/cart, I could get one for $350.00!

I'm also loving the new cover on the piano bench. I love that pattern.

I bought these genre posters last year and placed them above my board; however, that was just too high to use them. So, this year they are more accessible and I'm so glad. They will really help during the 6th grade History of Rock unit.

I debated about using Recorder Karate and finally decided to try it. I didn't want to go overboard with the karate theme so it is very subtle.

Again, thanks to Pinterest, I found so many recorder resources so I didn't have to reinvent the wheel! (which has made my summer so much more relaxing)

Thanks to...
Lauren at Rhythm and Glues for the recorder fingering charts. You can visit her blog here!
Emily at The Sweetest Melody for the Recorder Job Lanyards. You can visit her blog here!
The recorder rules picture from Pinterest! See it here! (If it is yours, let me know so I can give credit!)

I created an 11x17 chart to keep up with who has passed off which belt. You can write the students' names in the blanks and fill in the appropriate box once they have passed off that song. Download it here.

I also made a chart that lets everyone know which song correlates with which belt. I had a fear that students would be asking a million questions about this so I made this chart. You can download it here.

My choir section of the board. I included the choir tips charts and the singing shapes posters as well as a dry erase calendar from the Dollar Tree.

Finally, the ukulele section of my board. This one is not totally complete. I kinda just stuck it up there. I have my student expectations and the 4 chords we are going to (hopefully) master. Also, love that little ukulele chihuahua.

 My one and only formal bulletin board. I wanted to use birds in my room this year so I am calling them song birds. Song birds sing solfege so their word bubbles are do, re, mi.

I made the birds from scrap paper that matched my theme with inspiration from Carson Dellosa's Boho Birds (they kinda scared me a little...weird eyes)

Here is a close up of the poster in the middle. I want to print it 11x17 but that requires a trip to Office Depot. I'll get to it...  This came from here!

My door!! I kinda love how it turned out! I wanted to do an advocacy type door for Back to School Night when parents will be buzzing about. I just cut out a thought bubble from poster board, added some letters and cut out some question marks.

Here is an up close of the answers to the question! You can download them here!

 

 Unrelated to my room, are these two pictures. The guidance counselor and I have teamed up to make a bulletin board for parents and students to identify ways they can get involved. I added band and choir and she wanted to include a Get Fit program. Between the two of us, we came up with other programs we already had at school to include on our board.

Also, the librarian and I came up with a no curtain, no blinds, no sew, window covering for her windows in the library. We coordinated our fabrics, covered cut pieces of foam board, attached the fabric with no sew double sided fabric tape and stapled the corners (essential upholstering the foam board). We cut the board the exact size of the window so the squares fit snug in the window.

 

Hello, Goodbye

This past week was our first week back to school for inservices. Our band director is retiring after this year and he has asked me to take over more of his band responsibilities at the middle school. So, there is a big chance that I will be moving to beginning band for grades 5-7 and only teaching general music for K-4. Nothing is official yet due to scheduling but it is more probable than possible.

So, being the obsessive preparer that I am, I created some resources for my (hopefully) new band classes! Plus, after sitting in those teacher evaluation meetings, standards are on my brain.

Here are some sample standards posters for beginning band based on the Virginia Music Standards of Learning, which are based on the National Music Education Standards.

The wording is adapted for a middle school level. A teacher I worked with in college (while Tennessee was going through their new teacher evaluation training), created a poster that had basic beginning band standards that we do everyday because we are developing skills throughout the class, hence "Everyday, we will.."

You can download all 8 HERE.