Spin the Little Dreidel

Chanukah is Coming!

With Chanukah starting on December 12th, I thought it might be helpful to share a tiny bit of information regarding dreidels and how you might incorporate dreidel play into a music lesson.  I'm no expert, but I do know a thing or two. 

Those Letters Actually Mean Something

First off, the Hebrew letters of the dreidel look like this:

Top left: nun, top right: gimel
Bottom left: hei, bottom right: shin

The Hebrew letters of the dreidel are an abbreviation of the sentence "Nes gadol haya sham" which means "A great miracle happened there."  "There: meaning Israel and the "great miracle" was the oil lamps burning for eight nights. 

How to Play the Game

In traditional dreidel play, children have a handful of ______ to use for the game (gelt - chocolate coins, pennies, raisins, pennies, whatever).  Each child places one ______ into the middle and takes turns at spinning the dreidel.  Based on which letter faces up when the dreidel falls, the following possibilities will happen:  nun = "none" as in nothing happens; gimel = "gimme" as in everyone has to give a piece of ______ to that player; hei = "half" as in the player takes half of what is in the middle; and shin = "share" as in that player has to give a piece of ______ to the middle.  When there is nothing left in the middle, each child puts one ______ into the middle to continue play.

Now Add Music

Now that you've had your dreidel lesson, how can one incorporate dreidel play into the music room?  Well, first off, sing some dreidel songs!  "I Have a Little Dreidel" and "S'vivon" are the most common dreidel songs and will work just fine for the ideas I am sharing, but if you want something new, here's an original song I wrote a few years back:

Since the song is so short, i usually have my students sing it two or more times while we are playing a dreidel-like game.  Singing and playing the dreidel game might be all that you care to do, but my creative juices have been flowing and there many other ideas for incorporating other musical possibilities into dreidel play.

Other Creative Possibilities

Create rhythmic ostinati based on assigned elemental rhythms:  nun = quarter note, quarter rest; gimel = two quarter notes; hei = two eighth notes, quarter note; shin = four eighth notes.  If a group of four students each spun the dreidel, their pattern might end up like this: shin  hei  gimel  hei = eighth eighth eighth eighth eighth eighth quarter quarter (rest) eighth eighth quarter (rest).

Create percussion ostinato based on letters.  Again, each letter determines what to play.  For example: nun = drum, gimel = triangle, hei = wood block, shin = guiro.  using the group of students above, their percussion ostinato would be:  shin  hei  gimel  hei = guiro  wood block  guiro  triangle

Human Dreidel #1:  divide the class into four groups (one for each letter).  Give all students a small instrument to play (e.g. shakers or sticks).  Choose one student from each group to form a circle (the Human Dreidel) and circle around as the class sings the song and taps the beat with instruments.  Using a predetermined spot (a mark on the carpet, closest to the teacher, etc.) whatever letter comes up, that group has to give/receive one of their instruments based on the rules of the game.  Keep playing until one group is left with instruments to play.

Human Dreidel #2:  again, class is divided into four different groups representing the four letters of the dreidel and a student from each group is selected to be the Human Dreidel.  Each group is given a different instrument to play.  First time around, the class sings the song without instruments.  As with the example above, whatever letter comes up, that group gets to play instruments during the next turn.  Keep playing until all teams have had a turn.

Getting Nutty!

With Halloween ahead of us, you might think I would be writing all about Jack o' Lanterns and such, but not this time.  I do have a post from October 3, 2013 that details a cute lesson idea for K/1st if you're interested in pumpkin things, but I digress.....




Instead, I am turning my thoughts to something I have noticed foe the past few weeks.  As the weather has finally started to change, I have been noticing the acorns that have fallen onto the pathway as I walk my dog in the evening.  Since I was much younger, I have loved a good crunch as my foot stepped on a wayward acorn, dry leaf or even crisply frozen snow.  The musician in me just cannot resist purposely stomping them to hear the sounds that nature provides.


Then a couple of weeks ago, I saw this picture:

and I just had to laugh!  All of those squirrels busily gathering food for the winter must definitely be going "nuts' right about now, but I never imagined they would be singing about it.  It seemed that nature was conspiring to inspire my teaching and I devised a way of allowing my students to go nuts in a fun, productive way.  First, we learned the song "I'm An Acorn ("I'm A Nut)."  Notation is here:

The little dance is inspired by this segment from Wee Sing Sillyville.  I have students suggest different parts of the body to do the dance with:  hands, fingers, eyeballs, tongues (that one's fun!), etc.  In keeping with the nutty theme of the music, I looked for different types of nuts that could fit into some of Keetman's rhythmic building bricks.  Here is what I chose:

Students worked in groups to create patterns of four nuts:  e.g. al - mond  hazel - nut  al - mond  beech --. 

In a nutshell (HA!), this is how it all fit together:  the whole class sang the song while doing the dance with whatever body part was suggested by the next group.  When finished, that group went to drums and played their nutty rhythm.  Then they returned and we repeated the process with the next group.  This was a lot of fun and a bit different than the usual pumpkin games we have played in the past.

I have you enjoy this idea and have the chance to go nuts with your own students!





Music Is My Jam!

For the past few years, I have tried to create interesting hallway bulletin boards that inspire my students' imagination.  Last year the theme was "Get carried away by music."  It featured a pair of hands clasping the strings of many balloons with music words or pictures (e.g. "compose" or a picture of a xylophone).  The lettering was hand cut out of white paper to resemble skywriting on the blue sky background.  It was, in my opinion, a mini masterpiece.

So when we came back for preplanning week at the end of July, I felt a bit of pressure to create something just as wonderful for this school year.  I admit that I googled and looked for bulletin board ideas, but none of them really caught my fancy.  Don't ask me how, but I came up with the saying "Music is my Jam!" with the added on notion, "Spread it around," meaning to share it with others. I created a jam jar labeled "MUSIC", a knife with blobs of jam and a dozen plates with slices of bread and different kinds of "jam" (e.g. compose, sing, etc.).   Here it is:

I received many compliments on my work and that should be enough, right?  But after the first couple weeks of school, the notion of a musical jam session stuck with me and I just had to find a way to turn this into a lesson with my students.  Here is the breakdown of what we did and a few examples of student work.

First, we used the natural rhythm of the phrases "Music is my jam" and "Spread it around" and practiced it on our hands:

Then we transferred the hand motions to a partner drumming activity:  one partner held a hand drum while the other had a pair of mallets and played the first part.  During the "spread it around part" the drum holder rubbed the drum head with his hands while they all turned around to face a new partner.  This became our A section.

But wait - there's more!  I wanted my students to have some creative the chance to create small music "jams" of their own.  Enter rhythmic building blocks.  For those of you who don't know, Carl Orff's colleague and co-creator of the Schulwerk Gunild Keetman came up with the notion of rhythmic building blocks.  These are small (2 beat) permutations of rhythm that can be combined together to create larger rhythmic pieces.  In Orff practice, we use building blocks along with speech to enable student success when they are creating or improvising.  In this case, I went straight to the Smuckers website to see what flavors of jam they made.  Ah yes, the things a music teacher will do!  After a bit of research, these are the flavors I found to fit:

plum, mango, concord grape, strawberry, boysenberry

After familiarizing ourselves with each building block and practicing how to combine them into four beat phrases, students worked in groups of four (or so) with the task of:  choose two jam flavors to create an ostinato and figure out how you will perform it.  I encouraged students to incorporate movement or use different ways of holding or playing the drums.  Here are a couple of their ideas:

Incorporating movement with partners.

Finding a new way to play drums.

I hope you enjoy these ideas and they inspire you to find your own musical jam.  Spread it around!