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I have been using these excellent videos to help prepare my grade 2 students for our field trip to the orchestra! Each one focuses on a certain instrument family and has clip of each instrument playing on its own.   STRINGS   WOODWINDS     BRASS   PERCUSSION   Happy watching!  

I would like to do a Monday Music Manipulative with Lindsay at Pursuit of Joyfulness ! Super simple vocal exploration fun! This Music Manipulative is a skipping rope! First I read the book, "The Squiggle" by Carole Lexa Schaefer to my Kindergarten students. Next I created a "squiggle" for my kinders to sing. Usually, we start every class with a vocal warm-up that includes "painting" our sound with our fingers, following the sound of our vocal slides. Because of this, the students we prepared to "draw" the sound of the squiggle as they sang its shape.  After singing a skipping rope squiggle of mine, we added more skipping ropes to make the squiggle longer and a few students got to design their own for the class to sing. What manipulatives do you use to teach and/or reinforce a concept to your students?

Thank you to Mrs. Miracle for hosting this fantastic linky party! Check out her amazing blog and other bloggers who will be linking up! Here are my favourite pins of January! 1. iPad Organization This is an idea that was originally pinned from  Inspire. Love. Learn.   I can't wait to get my iPads organized! 2. Beethoven- Composer of the Month Printables I can't wait to get these laminated! I've already bought and printed them out. Thank you to Sara Bibee for having this at  Teachers Pay Teachers . 3. Recorder Fingering Chart I love this! It is cute and super clear, especially for my beginner recorder players. My grade 4 students started Recorder Karate this month and I have given them this chart to refer to.  4. Instrument Family Trivia Game for SMART Board This looks like a great resource! I haven't used this yet, but I am planning on using it for my groups that are going to the orchestra this year. 5. Word Wall Idea for Composer of the Month I love this idea! I wil...

January is Under the Sea theme for my primary Music classes and I wanted to come up with a composition idea for my grade 1 and grade 1/2 students that was different than our grade 1 Shark and grade 2 Jellyfish compositions from last year.  I decided to focus on Jellyfish with this new idea because I am obsessed with them right now! This activity took about 45 minutes total and was so fun and valuable for the kids!  Jellyfish Non-Pitched Percussion Composition Activity: We did this activity after exploring the movement of various under water creatures! 1. Students each received a coffee filter and coloured it with markers. They left a lot of white so that the colours would blend nicely later on. This part only took ten minutes! 2. I sprayed down all of the filters with a water spray bottle and had the kids watch the transformation! 3. During the following class students decided on non-pitched instrument sounds they thought matched jellyfish movement. Movement words that came ...

2/4 Tuesday! Where we post about 2-4 ideas for the Music classroom! Join in the fun by linking up at the end of this post! In your post, please include the Linky Party button above with a link to my post! Let's party y'all! 1. Simple Backdrop Idea This backdrop stand was something that I decided to create for our holiday concert. We have very strict fire and safety regulations in our school division and backdrops have been an issue. The last few years I have been using 4'x8' coroplast sheets (lightweight sheeting used for election boards) instead of canvas for our backdrops. What is great about the coroplast is that we can paint over it time and time again. The sheets that we have, have been painted over 5 times now!  For this past holiday concert I only used two sheets, one on each side of the stage, because we perform that concert off-site. Creating these stands out of PVC piping makes mounting each backdrop so simple and is easy to transport! This year, our grade 1-3...

It is cold. I mean COLD. Minus 47 degrees C with the wind chill cold. -53 F!  Happy first day of school everyone. I live in the land of Winter. Where school is NEVER cancelled. Anyways… I am also back… with 2/4 Tuesdays! I will be hosting this linky party the first Tuesday of each month instead of every week. I found that it was getting…old. I'm freshening it up by making it a monthly party! It's baaa-aack! Tomorrow, join me and create a blog post about 2-4 ideas that you are implementing in your classroom (or are planning to implement) and link up to to my post tomorrow to join in the fun! If you don't have a blog yet, be sure to check back for everyone's great ideas! See you tomorrow!

I saw that  Mrs. Miracle  was taking part in a fun Linky party so I decided to check out Principal Principles blog and decided to take part in the fun!  It was interesting going through my pins of 2013 and seeing which ones got repinned the most! Some of these pins were my ideas, and some were ideas I found and pinned on Pinterest. 1.  Keyboard Bulletin Board   (305 repins!) This is the most repinned pin on my Music Education pinboard. I am not sure where it is from originally, the pin is connected to a photo and not a blog or website. I pinned this with the intention of perhaps using it as a rewards/incentive board… hahaha… I still need to do that. 2.  Classroom Organization Ideas   (137 repins)  This is the most repinned pin of my own classroom ideas. Too bad my room doesn't look this organized all of the time! Oh well there's always 2014! 3. Rhythm Blocks   (30 repins)  I love this idea from  Music A La Abbott . I need to start ...