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Link up with me for another 2/4 Tuesday! All you have to do is blog about 2-4 ideas and link-up! I am on the hunt for great music education apps for my new iPad! Here are four apps that I am excited to use in my classroom. 1. Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra APP! I am really excited about this app because our grade two classes are going to the orchestra this year and will be listening to excerpts from Britten's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra. Check it out! I will let you know what I think! 2. ABC Music APP This will be a great one for my little grade one and Kindergarden students. This looks like an app that would really be fun for kids to explore various instruments. 3. Jelly Band  This looks so fun! I think this would be excellent for my young students to prepare them for Garage Band compositions in grade 6. I plan on using this with my Grade 3 students this year. 4. DoReMi 1-2-3 This looks fantastic for all sorts of reasons! Pitch matching games, composing an...

Thanks to Aileen at Mrs. Miracle's Music Room   for hosting Five Favorite Pins of September! Here are my five favourite (note the Canadian spelling :) ) pins of September! I hope Aileen does one for October too! I love this idea for a Linky Party! Please check out the other blogs that have linked up! 1. Musical Groceries Centre Click on the link to go directly to Ashley Queen's blog for teachers. It is EXCELLENT! This is a cute and fun centre using fake fruit to create rhythm patterns. 2. Rhythm Cubes This rhythm cube idea is a great pin and is originally from Music a la Abbott. Can't wait to make these bad boys. 3. Parts of a Listener Poster I want this for my room! Check out the pin, originally pinned from Andrea Knight on Teachers Pay Teachers. 4. Awesome Bulletin Board I love this idea. I wish I had a big bulletin board outside my room for this one. The original pinner is not named. If this is your board, let me know so I can recognize you! 5. Online Metronome This is c...

Welcome back to the 2/4 Tuesday Linky Party! Yet again I only have 2 things to share! 1. Canoe Song (good for teaching ti-ta-ti, or syn-co-pa) FREE interactive activities I thought I would share my new and improved Smart notebook file of Canoe song! I use this song with my grade fours to teach ti-ta-ti. We learn the melody and identify the new rhythm and also learn to play the melody for the first time (we played harmony only prior to this). HERE are the slides from the Smart notebook file. For the first two slides I work with my students to match the proper rhythms with the words to our song. The second slide is a replica of the worksheets I have my students fill out. They match the rhythm box according to the words of the song and then copy out the rhythm above the words. After filling out our rhythms independently, we start figuring out the melody of the song on the barred instruments. I cover up the measures and remove them as we go to keep the students focused and to avoid them fe...

Welcome to 2/4 Tuesday! Link up below to join the party! Below are 2 ideas from my classroom! 1. Cool Instrument Labels! Classroom tour photos are still to come, I promise! In the meantime I thought I would share photos of my newly organized instrument shelving. First off, my white shelving gets pretty scratched up so I decided to put shelf lining on my shelves. $1.00 a roll from Dollarama!  I got a wonderful gift from a teacher friend who knows my retro 90's style! What cute mixed tape labels  from Target! They go perfectly with my room. I use them to mark where on the shelves the instruments should go. Aren't they cute?! 2. Choral Picks for Fall 2013 I have chosen some rep for my 2013/2014 grade 4-6 Choir year! I am excited! Here is what our choir is singing for Fall 2013. Murasame by Victor C. Johnson This is a beautiful and neat arrangement of a Japenese folk song. I can't wait for my kids to sing it. Click  HERE   for a sound clip! See below to hear King College...

Thanks again to Lindsay from Pursuit of Joyfulness  for hosting another Manipulative Monday! Things are crazy, but I wanted to take part in this linky party so I decided to post about JITTERSTICKS! I posted already about these little things that I made, but it was one of my first posts, so I figured most people haven't seen it yet. I use these all the time as brain breaks for my kids. When they have been sitting a while, I let a student choose a jitter stick. The sticks also end up acting as motivation for kids to stay focused, because they really want a turn to pick a jitter stick out of the can! Click  HERE   for the how to! Click HERE  for more Monday Music Manipulatives posts! Tune in tomorrow for a 2/4 Tuesday!

Yay for Mrs. Q and Freebie Friday! Check out her blog and other bloggers that linked up to her party HERE ! I just posted fun, musical high fives in my Music room this week! This idea stemmed from... you guessed it! Another classroom teacher blog! I found an idea for hand outlines and posters for practising sight words. Words were inside the hand prints and posted as high fives at the classroom entrance. Various activities were used as an exit slip with the high five sight words. I decided to make some high fives of my own! This might be a great idea, or a complete disaster! I have posted my high five sign and high fives right next to the Music room door. Students will high five a statement that is true for them, relating to the Music class they just had. As they walk out, students high five their chosen statement. Here is my original High Five poster: Here is the black and white version of the High Five sign. I used this instead and printed it on lime green paper. Here are some exampl...

Join my Linky Party! Or at least check out all of the links! Thank-you to everyone who linked up last week, even our late arrivals! I'm including a couple random ideas. My classroom tour photos are still to come this week! 1. The Best Beatbox Video You Will Ever See So I have to teach a double class in my little room. That's about 50 grade 5/6 students in my itty bitty room. So to get settled into the space for the first time, we watched this amazing video! I fast forwarded his talk at the beginning though, a couple jokes that wouldn't be good for the kiddoes ;) 2. Student Workbook/Journals This is something new I am trying this year. It's quite a bit of work, but I think it will be worth it. Hoping anyways!  I am trying these Music workbooks out with my grade 2 and 3 classes this year. First, I bought a whack of notebooks from Staples (4 for 99 cents!) and cut them in half. Then I decided what I wanted inside them. I decided to put three copies of each work page (that ...

I am linking up with Lindsay at  Pursuit of Joyfulness  for her Linky party! I'm all for being crafty and making stuff, but for something different I thought I would blog about munipulatives that you actually don't have to make. Random objects that are easy to reinforce singing concepts! 1. Hulahoops I use hula hoops for helping students internalize melody and lyrics. I place a hula hoop on the ground and have a student stand inside the hula hoop. The rest of the class or choir sings while the student is in the hula hoop. When that student jumps out of the hula hoop everyone needs to sing "inside their heads". It is a blast and the kids love it. It really helps them internalize beat as well. 2. Skipping Rope I nabbed this idea from one of my amazing university profs. JL, you know who you are :) I still use this with my students to kinaesthetically experience so-mi. The skipping rope is used as the line on the floor and I have one student jump across the skipping rope ...