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.
