Wednesday, December 18, 2019

December Newsletter

Thank you for some wonderful music in December! I hope you all have a fabulous winter break. Just to give everyone a heads up: we will have a student teacher working with our students January 6th-April 10th here in the music room. His name is Mr. Matson and his wife is already a strings teacher here in our district. We are excited to welcome him to our school after winter break. Here are some highlights from the music room this month:

Kindergarten: we continued to work on tracing the melodies we sing and use lots of hand percussion in our "Going to the Farm" game. We continued to work on created 4-beat rhythms for each other to echo in our first activity every class.

1st grade: we are working on becoming composers! We practiced writing 8-beat rhythms on white boards and paper before performing each other's rhythms on various hand percussion.

2nd grade: We have been working on a super fun song, "Great Big House" using our new singing notes (Do and Re). There is a complicated movement game to go with this song. Here is a link to college students demonstrating it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt3mxHZJtdM
Our students are able to complete this challenging task at a more appropriate tempo, it's awesome!

3rd grade: we are working on our winter song, "Happy Winter" for the winter assembly on December 20th at 9:40am. We hope you can join us for this performance! We will be singing with the choir, and then reviewing some fun winter traditions from around the world.

4th grade: we are starting to prepare for recorders in January, yay! More information will be sent home after winter break.

5th grade: we finished reviewing our rhythmic notation, and are about done reviewing our pitch notation (5-line staff). We are doing this in preparation for using an awesome notation program available on their chromebooks. All students have access to this program via their Edmonds email, and it's totally free! Check it out: https://flat.io/

6th grade: we are putting the final touches on "Pride" in preparation for our performance at the Martin Luther King, Jr. assembly. Please make sure to attend our assembly performance on Monday, January 13th at 9:30am. These students are ready to perform for you :)