Hello!

Hello! A lot has changed since I last blogged. I am now the band director in our school district. I am teaching instrumental music for grades 5-12 at two schools! We are 3 football games away from the end of the season and are currently preparing for a Halloween concert for our elementary school.

My last blog post was in March and I interviewed and got the job in April. From then on, everything has been a blur! We had auditions, summer music rehearsals, car washes, guard camp, percussion camp, drill writing, band camp, football games, parades, pep rallies, and fundraisers.

Even though I love teaching band, I am missing my elementary music duties. We always had so much fun in the elementary music classroom! Going through the comments waiting and reading your comments has made me a bit nostalgic.

I received a call yesterday from a fellow music teacher and blogger asking about ukuleles and I realized, "Oh my gosh, my blog!" I feel terrible that I have neglected everything :( Now that marching band and football season are over, I will do better (I will also change the settings so that blogger emails me when I have comments waiting...I'm sorry!!)

This summer, we are looking at moving schools and I may be back to the general music world :) but until then, I will check in more regularly and stay more up on emailing you all back.

Cassandra

World Music: Africa

For the last two weeks we have been working on songs from Africa. First we learned Che Che Koolay. You can get the powerpoint from the post here! The kids love this song! This was our first venture into syncopation and it went great.

After learning the tune and working out the rhythm, the kids worked out the melody on the tone bars. They worked in pairs to do this and recorded the note names on this chart. You can get it here! (I printed them 2 on a page to save paper.)

This week, we are learning Funga Alafia. This is one of the tunes included in Jamie Parker's World Music Set found here. There is a great video of this tune performed with instruments floating around Youtube. I made a similar but simple arrangement for my 3rd graders to perform. 

We performed this today with 4 stations of instruments and rotated so each group got to play each instrument and part. Once they were comfortable with the parts, I played the melody on the piano so they could hear it and they joined in singing. It was a really enjoyable lesson.