Thirty Days Has September

Several years back, I had the privilege of participating in a series of master sessions with Orff Schulwerk stalwart Jane Frazee at the AOSA national conference.  Aside from the privilege of learning from one of the true masters of the Schulwerk, I also found myself as a student peer to several of the teachers who had taught me in my Orff levels coursework.  It was both overwhelming and exhilarating.

Beyond the specific activities we learned and the group work we created in the moment, what I remember most are a few sage words of wisdom from Ms. Frazee.  In addition to pieces from the Music for Children volumes and folk material from different cultures, she advised us to plan a curriculum that included time tested rhymes, prose and adages.  One that stood out to me as a musical possibility is the rhyme I learned as a child to remember the number of days in each month:

Thirty days has September, April, June and November.

February has twenty-eight alone.  All the rest have thirty-one.

Say for leap year; 

That's the time February's days are twenty-nine.

I have used this rhyme as the basis of a rhythm and body percussion lesson with my older students (4th and 5th grades).  At first, I teach them a simple body percussion piece by rote.  After learning the short example, I guide students to talk with a partner about how it might be written down.  After a few minutes, we regroup and students answers.  And, in an age of social media and portable technology, I am thankful that they can still find so many possibilities.  The body percussion could be written with:  music notes, words, letter abbreviations, numbers, colors, drawings, shapes, Morse code, etc.  Sometimes, I have to set a limit or their answers will eat up too much class time.  Finally, I focus them back to the answer of color and present the following visual:

I give them time to learn the body percussion of the rhyme,then we perform it together.  After they are pretty comfortable with the rhyme and body percussion, I followup the color coded version with its music notation:

Now, this is all fine and good and could probably stop there.  But, having been immersed in a body percussion piece about months for a class period or two, my students are ready to take it to another level.  The rhyme will have more meaning to them students if they have a personal connection to it.  So, to that end, I extend the lesson one more step by having students work in groups to create body percussion pieces based on the rhythms of their birthdays.  Suddenly, January 16th is not just a day on the calendar, it is a rhythm (s=s=s=s e-e) that has many musical possibilities.  This past week I witnessed my students' group work and, as always, was blown away by what they created together.  And it all came from a rhyme I learned when i was a child.