THANK YOU BALINT CHARITIES!

We are so excited to have a class set of brand new resonator bells to play this year, thanks entirely to Balint Charities! Please visit their website here: http://www.balintcharities.org

Through the Fran’s Bands program, our school received these wonderful new instruments which have already helped our younger students to accompany themselves as they sing. We can also use these wonderful instruments to help with beginning composing songs, because the color coded bars make it easy for students of all ability levels to write their own original songs through color-coding! Best of all, we have a class set of instruments, so we no longer have to take turns sharing to all have a turn playing. Now we can play all at once, which means the time we would have spent taking several turns so that everyone could play, can be used to learn new music concepts.

In Kindergarten, students learn the nursery rhyme “Wee Willie Winkie” and add movements and a melody to the piece. In First grade, not only do we speak, move, and sing, we played a two-note accompaniment on our resonator bells! Here are the students in action!

      

Steady Beats, Rhythms and more…

This month, Kindergarten worked hard to play djembe drums or hand drums to a steady beat. They practiced alternating hands as they played. They later added rhythms on rhythm sticks to the drums to play two different parts of the piece at once!

                     

First graders are already pros at the steady beat, so they reviewed what a steady beat sounds like, and then took it to the next level. They improvised original pieces of music which sometimes used a steady beat, and other times had no steady beat. They practiced watching the conductor to know when they could play without the steady beat and when they all needed to play a steady beat together. Some students even tried conducting the music as the students improvised.