If All the World Were Paper....

Way back in 2007, I was living in the San Francisco bay area and was doing my part to help the Northern California AOSA chapter prepare to host the national conference in San Jose.  Aside from loaning instruments from my school and presenting a recorder session, most of my duties involved the AOSA boutique.  Those of you who have been to a national conference know that the host chapter sponsors a boutique full of teaching materials, manipulatives and ideas.  A portion of the funds raised at the boutique go toward local chapter scholarships for professional development.  Anyway, as part of the boutique committee, I spent several Saturdays meeting with chapter members to make ribbon streamers, abstract artwork note cards and small percussion instruments.  I also put together a collection of original canons written by chapter members and contributed a lesson idea to another book titled Simple Play.  

Over the years, I have really embraced the concept of Simple Play - using everyday objects and a bit of imagination to create engaging lessons in movement and music.  One of my favorites has become a simple piece of paper.  What started out as a simple folding activity has grown into imaginative play, creative movement and found sound performances.

Paper Play #1:  Found Sounds

In 2012, I was presenting a session at the St. Louis national conference.  The focus of the session was on using little pieces from the Music for Children volumes as resource material for new lessons.  The culminating piece was a take on the very well know "Ding Dong Diggidiggidong" from Volume One.  Using its sixteen beats as a rhythmic framework, participants were encouraged to created rhythmic variations using found objects:  the conference notebooks, chairs, etc.  Inevitably, a group was given a bunch of paper and explored its many sound qualities.  It was always enjoyable to hear the nuances of ripping, crumpling, tapping, blowing and other sounds the groups found within a simple piece of paper.

Paper Play #2:  Imaginative Play

Over several years, I have developed a sequence of activities to accompany the song "Who Has the Penny?" with my first graders.  Each object of the singing game (penny, key, paperclip) is given its own special day.  On Paperclip Day, I admit that I don't really have a paperclip song, but a paperclip's job is to hold papers together, so.....it's Paper Day!  After learning the song above, I teach students how to accordion fold a piece of paper.  Many of them already know this as fan folding, but being the music teacher, I prefer my term.  As students finish their folding, I ask them to imagine the many items that piece of paper can become and we perform corresponding beat motions as we sing the song (e.g. play the accordion, fan yourself, etc.).  Here are just a few of their ideas:

                                             fan                                   hat

                                            beard                             triangle

                                      ice cream cone                   dust pan

                             
                             
                         bow tie, hair bow                               guitar, trumpet
                              mustache                                            broom

                      accordion, xylophone                           window blinds                                       

                       
                                                                stairs

Paper Play #3:  Movement 

A simple piece of paper can be used to get students to explore creative movement and isolate certain parts of the body.  Just imagine students copying the bending, folding and twisting of a piece of paper.  I usually take them through a sequence of movements in a stand position - jumping, hopping, turning around, moving one then both arms, twisting at the waist - before lightly folding the paper into a "sitting" position.  After a few seated poses (legs stretched out, lying down, criss cross), I crumple the paper into a ball.  After the initial freakout (!), I guide them through gradually unfolding themselves by pulling part by part of the crumpled ball out (e.g. "Oh look, one elbow popped out.") until they are back in whatever position is needed for the next activity.  Once students experience these possibilities as a whole group, it is fun to have them work in pairs or small groups with one student conducting the movements of the others.

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!

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.

In defense of Real Music Making

Has it really been over a year since I posted anything?  Wow!  Let's just say, I've thought about it - for a really long time - but got a bit busy.  I'm not one of those truly dedicated bloggers who post something every week or day, but when I do you can be assured that I have put a lot of thought into what I'm saying and, like I said, this one has been brewing for a long time.

A couple of years ago, I was chatting with a couple of colleagues and the topic of sound systems and such came up.  I casually commented that all I really used was a microphone to address the audience at performances or for the occasional soloist.  One of the other music teachers looked at me incredulously and asked, "Well, don't you need a sound system and monitors?"  I replied by saying that I did not use recorded music in my performances and only use recordings on occasion for movement activities in class.  She had gotten so used to the default music program that so many teachers cling to - pop-style "kidsongs" with lush accompaniment tracks an no lasting value - that I thought her eyes might pop out of her head.  She then asked, "Well, what do you DO?"  In a matter of fact tone, I explained that I played the piano and ukulele and had the students themselves play instrumental accompaniments they had learned in class.  She just couldn't seem to wrap her head around it.  I might as well have been speaking another language.  And, in a way, I was.

I am an Orff specialist.  I take great pride in saying that.  I worked very hard to be able to say that.  And I work very hard every day to make sure I can keep on calling myself one.  It would be easier to fall back on packaged musicals, prepared lessons, accompaniment tracks that don't change with the needs and whims of students aged 5-11, overuse of technology and videos, videos videos.  But then I would be teaching my students, and myself, to be dependent on tools in order to make music rather than nurturing the musician that lurks inside of them.  They would become the family in that AT&T ad who freaks out when the internet is out and has no idea of what to do without it.  It makes me want to scream at the TV, "Go outside and play!  Do a crossword puzzle!  Sing a song!  Draw a picture!  Write a story!  DO SOMETHING!"  Yeah, sure I might catch the occasional eyeroll or bored look from one of my 5th graders for not teaching the latest pop song or using all of the technology that fills the rest of their day.  But when they leave my classroom at the end of the day, even those students say "I can't get that song out of my head!"  And then they have something to do whenever the internet goes out.  Score one for Real Music Making.

Old dog, new tricks.....Part Two

So, I realize that a lot of teachers who read blogs are more interested in the "stuff" than my storytelling.  I never intended this to be that sort of blog (although I used to post a link to my Teachers Pay Teachers store in every post), but occasionally I share some little bit that you might be able to use in your own teaching.

Well, the other day, as I was cleaning out my desk, I came across a printout of an old post I had written for the MENC (now NAfME) forum on November 1st, 2008.  As far as I know, those forums are no longer around, but the advice I shared is still pretty relevant and I offer it again here for anyone interested.

Some Possible Ways to Refresh an Old Textbook Series

1.  Folk songs never go out of style.  Instead of following the textbook lesson, use the folk songs in them as pathways to other musical concepts.  Bring in some simple accompaniment (guitar, ukulele, dulcimer) and some rhythm instruments for the students to create ostinatos with and enjoy a new take on these old classics.

2.  Pentatonic songs lend themseles to basic Orff accompaniment.  Look through the materials for songs that use a pentatonic scale.  These can be simply accompanied using a root-fifth drone and some color parts.

3. Be cautious of the "composed" songs.  Many textbooks offer many songs that teach cross-curricular concepts (math, language arts, etc.).  The notion of curriculum integration is fine, but make sure the material is musical and worthwhile for the children.

4. There are often decent, short biographies of composers in the series that are of interest to students.  you can use the listening examples for expressive movement activities to get the students actively involved in the lesson.

5.  There is also a wealth of poetry and prose in textbooks that can be used in interesting ways.  You can explore rhythm, meter and timbre using poetry.  For example, you can lead students to find the natural rhythm of poetry,then challenge them to create a short speech ostinato that uses a phrase from the poem.  Transfer the ostinato to rhythm instruments and you have an accompaniment for the poem.  More freeform poetry can lead to exploration of instrumental timbres and vocal expression.  Allow student input into sounds that could highlight key words or phrases of a poem.

These are just a few ideas that popped into my head.  Though I do not use a textbook series, I do look to the series that I have in my storage room as a resource.