April
Students in grade one will be learning to listen to music for clues as to what the song is about.
The songs we will listen to have no lyrics! How will the children know what the song is about?
This type of song is called “program music”. There is a definite theme, idea or story, but no lyrics. This requires another level of listening to the music.
We will listen to the tempo, dynamics, rhythms, harmonies, pitches, texture, etc. to figure out which song matches which title.
The songs will be taken from Robert Starer’s Sketches in Colour.
The songs are entitled:
- Purple
- Shades of Blue
- Black and White
- Bright Orange
- Grey
- Pink
- Crimson
We will also learn a hand clapping game called “Head and Shoulders Baby” and a dance called “Sur La Pont d”Avignon” for more fun and active activities to break up all of the listening!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ya8EZ5092RU
March
We are going to have some fun this March!
We will play games that involve our percussion instruments to review the instruments we learned about while we were in Kindergarten! These include:
Maracas
Guiros
Cabasas
Hand drums
Triangles
Woodblocks
Tambourines
Rhythm Sticks
Finger Cymbals
Bongo Drums
Etc.
We will play the rhythms we are singing, and we will play the beat, to explore the difference between rhythm and beat. Oh won’t it be fun!
February
The grade ones are now taking what they learned about movement and dance in January and creating a dance, as a class. The children paired up and each pair were given an effort to focus on. They thought of a dance movement using that effort. The class is deciding what order in which to use the effort and creating a dance from those efforts. They will perform these for their teacher.
Next we will be learning a song called “The Northern Lights”. The lyrics are as follows:
The moon is out the stars are bright,
It’s quiet on this winter night,
And in the sky so cold and clear
The northern lights start to appear.
Red lights sparkle,
Green lights sparkle,
Blue lights sparkle,
Yellow lights sparkle,
But when the sun pokes out her head,
It’s time for the lights to go to bed.
We will learn to sing this song, play the accompaniment on the xylophones and create a movement to go with the “sparkling lights”.
January
Grade Ones in Divisions 16 and 17 will be learning about Laban’s Eight Efforts of movement this term. Rudolf Laban was a dance teacher who broke movement down into 8 possible efforts.
Here is a chart to show how he broke these down:
We can use these efforts to communicate the way we feel and experience the music we play and hear, dance movements we participate in or see, and general articulations. We also can learn more about the way our bodies move and the children can control and learn about their gross motor development.
We will look at some examples of dance and identify the way they are moving using these efforts. We will also experience the music we listen to and play using these movements. The students will conduct each other on instruments thinking about these movements too.
We are also learning a song called “Dragons” for Lunar New Year. We will perform this song in the January 31st assembly using xylophones and some percussion instruments in the background.
The lyrics are below:
Green dragons, gold dragons, dragons all in blue
Fierce dragons, bold dragons, fire-breathers too
Smokey old steamers of a most enormous type
All have claws that can catch you with just one fatal swipe
Green dragons, gold dragons flying through the air
Young dragons, old dragons waiting in their lair
Whirling-eyed scaly-skinned they’re stalking in the night
Till they pounce and then scoop you up and take a great bite!
November
Here is the choreography for Ms. Andaya’s class and Ms. S’s class to practice along with.
The choreographies for Divisions 16, 17, 18 are below.
October
Time to welcome Fall!
In the music room we will be celebrating Fall with a poem about pumpkins.
Pumpkin Patch
Pumpkin Patch
Looking all around in a pumpkin patch
Here is a pumpkin nice and fat
Turn into a jack-o’lantern just like that!
There is a game that goes with this poem. And as we play the game we explore drama skills as well as dynamics (loud and soft) and steady beat and rhythm music skills.
We are also singing a song called “Aiken Drum”. Here is Raffi’s version of “Aiken Drum”.
We are using our creativity to think of what Aiken Drum could be made of. We are doing visual art to draw a picture of our version of Aiken Drum. And we are learning about instruments as we “play the ladle” – each child can play it like any instrument they wish!
We are also exploring drama skills by playing their favourite October game, “Magic Spell” by Denise Gagné.
And we will explore major and minor tonalities by deciding if our jack-o’lanterns have happy (major) or sad/scary (minor) faces to match the music.
September
Welcome (back) to Armstrong grade 1 students!
We will begin this school year with singing activities. We will be singing “This Land Is Your Land” at the Terry Fox assembly in September. We will also sing many other classic campfire tunes like “Bill Grogan’s Goat”, “The Fox” and “On Top Of Spaghetti” and “Down By The Bay”.
We will review O Canada, the Coast Salish Anthem and The Armstrong School Song for the assemblies coming up this fall.
We are going to learn about musical and movement patterns. There are so many patterns in music, and they are so important to music!
Here is a video we will use and dance along with that will begin our work with patterns.