September Week 1 notes

5th grade:
I love the Good Morning song and the kids really enjoyed this activity all week!
I put this rhythm on the board - ti ta ti ta ta
After having students clap the rhythm I had them come up with other ways they could use their body percussion to play that rhythm for me. Some kids were really creative! I had a lot of mouth sounds in addition to stomps, claps, pats and snaps! haha!
After sharing with each other we put the syncopated rhythm into a 4 measure phrase. The first three measures were the syncopated rhythm -1st all stomps, 2nd all pats and 3rd all claps. The fourth measure was ta ta ta rest and we "air partner" clapped. Students got with a partner and we put it together with this speech:
Put it in your feet
Put it in your lap
Put it in your hands
Partner Clap (rest)
I labeled it as the B SECTION (this is a modification from the rhythm in the book)
Then I played guitar and taught them the A section by rote.
We put A and B together with our partners and then played the game (each time A happens we find a new partner!)
We then went to our seats and I displayed the poem "Out Goes the Rat" on the smart board with the rhythm notated. Students found the measures with 'ti ta ti ta ta' and we worked out the body percussion with the rhythm of the words. I taught it basically right from the book but we used drums in the A section, woods were the syncopated rhythm parts and metals were the half notes.

Just those 2 lesson parts along with making a seating chart took up the 45 minutes in my class. Next week I plan to use the poem "Out Goes the Cat" in Mallet Madness style.

4th grade (we did the same lesson as 5th grade.)

3rd grade - I used Jeff and Randy's "Welcome Back to School" (from one of their holiday books) as our first activity and Artie Almeida's Rhythm Rockets as our 2nd activity. Sometimes there were a few minutes left so we practiced our rhythm flashcards.

2nd grade - I acutally used the 3rd grade "Up the Ladder" song/game with 2nd grade and they really enjoyed it! They had fun when I would spontaneously change "one by one" with "two by two," etc!
We used the Chapelle track "Rock and Stop" to demonstrate non-locomotor and locomotor steady beat.
Some classes did the "Fuzzy Wuzzy" poem with instruments and some classes did the "Go Go Go" activity with instruments. I have both on smart board to show the accent on the specific beats and we played our unpitched percussion on the accents. We passed them on the B section

1st grade - After the seating chart we got in a circle and kept the steady beat while I played the drum. Students would take turns finding a new way to show the beat and we would "follow the leader." After several student rotations we used "All the Way to Gallway" (RM) as the music for our steady beat.
I taught them "Welcome Back to School" (from the 1st grade book) and they picked their own unpitched percussion and we worked on passing and playing.
We came back to our seats and looked at the visual I made for "5 Little Monkeys" - as I read the book we played with our vocal exploration and after the story I had a slide with different line shapes and we did vocal exploration on "oooo" - a student volunteer or two got to come to the board to draw their own shape for the vocal exploration.

Stay tuned in a couple weeks for how I adapted and used September week 2!!!!