All about my life

I love the holiday season! Yipeeeee! And as much as our holiday musical songs can drive me crazy (I wake up in the middle of the night with them stuck in my head!) I love preparing for our annual Holiday Musical! To keep from kids getting bored (as well as myself), I always like to add quick, fun and meaningful activities in my rehearsal plans. For our holiday musical, all of our grade 1 to 3 students learn the songs during their Music class and are the chorus on the stage for the musical. Grade 3 students choose whether or not they would like a speaking part and practice during lunch time. Here are some activities that I love to do with my kids to keep them engaged, especially during that time where the kids think they are pros at the songs. They don't see the point in singing over and over and over again, but you know better!  Visuals For Vocal Flexibility Ribbon Sounds I use this as a warm up or an "inbetweener" for rehearsal. All you do is draw different shapes with t...

Oh my goodness! It has been so long since I posted! The AOSA conference in St. Louis was fabulous and I finally caught up on all of my work last week from being away!   I like giving my students Mad Minute note naming sheets for a quick look at how they are doing with treble clef notation. I came across this website today to make your own Mad Minutes quickly and easily online. Click here to try it out:  Second Runner Up .   Check out my first Mad Minute using the site! Let me know what you think!     - Steph

Weeeeeee! I am currently sitting in the Minneapolis airport waiting to board my flight to St. Louis for this year's AOSA conference! I am so excited to be spending the rest of the week with a bunch of other kooky Music teachers! As a Canadian, I am extra excited for a trip to the States, not to mention take part in the Amerian Orff Schulwerk Association's HUGE national conference. Click HERE  for the AOSA conference website! I have chosen my sessions and am looking forward to learning from clinicians who I have seen before, whose resources I love using in my classroom, and clinicians who are brand new to me! Some clinicians I will be seeing are Doug Goodkin, Sofia Lopez-Ibor, Paul Corbiere, Patrick Ware, and Artie Almeida. I use resources by each of these clinicians in my classroom! Other clinicians who I don't know too much about, but am really looking forward to attending their sessions are Cheryle Lawrence, Kris Oleson and fellow Canadian Sue Harvie. St. Louis here we co...

We are starting to play recorder again soon. Grade 4 students will be playing for the first time! How exciting! I better start taking some Advil to school with me... Just kidding! Anyways, I thought having a bulletin board that reviews note names in the treble clef staff would be very useful! Here it is!  Hockey tape for making the staff, orange foam dollar store circles for the notes!  The kids got a kick out of their friends being characters on the bulletin board! This guy looks like he should be working with Captain Kirk! Do you have any note name bulletin board ideas? - Steph

My grade 6 students have been working on the tune "Duke's Place", an arrangement of Duke Ellington's C-jam blues. This arrangement by Doug Goodkin is found in his book, "Now is the Time", published by Pentatonic Press. While learning the Goodkin written words, barred instrument parts and working on improvising, we have been identifying and talking about the 12 bar blues.  In preparation for their assessment at the end of the week, we had a sorting contest today! I created cards that had I, IV or V on them and put them in packages of 13 cards (one extra to make it more tricky!) paper clipping them together. After reviewing 12 bar blues with students for the millionth time (...well it felt like it...) I put them in pairs and gave them a package of chord symbols. They were to leave their pack face down with the paper clip on. When I said, "Go!" the pairs needed to organize their cards as fast as they could in order to create the 12 bar blues pattern. ...

I am currently getting music centres organized and I am having so much fun! I came across a great idea from Sing A New Song . She uses lego blocks with her students in order to build rhythms. I was in Dollarama yesterday and came across these! A pack for only $3.00, so I bought two.  I bought mini labels and cut them to fit the blocks. I was going to keep these rounded off pieces out of our centres, but then I thought they looked like feet! I thought, "We could make robots!" Students will have three different activities to do at the Robot Rhythms centre. While in pairs, one partner builds a robot with the blocks. When finished, their partner must clap and say the rhythms from head to toe and then toe to head. Partners then switch jobs. The second activity is similar, except the student rolls a die before building their robot. The number they roll, will show the amount of beats their robot must contain.   I still really like the idea of how Sing a New Song has the students...