First Day! (7 November 2014)

Today was my first day with Sherry Larson's 3rd grade class. It was so much fun! I was a little nervous because this is still so new for me, but Mrs. Larson was so encouraging and had some great ideas and suggestions. I really feel like I am going to learn a lot from her and her class.

For class today, I decided to teach about tempo and dynamics in conjunction with parts of speech. This worked well because often in music we use various adjectives, verbs, and even nouns to describe both of these aspects of music. To start, we used our desks as drums and used our hands to describe different animals, since they have been focusing on nouns this week. It was fun to experiment with how heavy a bear might sound or how gentle and quick a mouse could be.The children enjoyed picking animals to imitate

Next, I brought a recording of "In the Hall of the Mountain King" by Grieg. This piece shows very well dynamic and tempo contrasts since it starts very soft and slow, then by the end it is loud and almost frantically fast. I found a video of the Berlin Philharmonic performing so that the children could see an orchestra actually play. Unfortunately, however, the sound system wasn't working very well, so we really had to listen hard to hear the melody. Fortunately, though, the melody is very simple and easy to learn, so afterwards the children could sing the music. We sang together and tapped the beat on our desks. Then I invited any students who had a desire to come and lead the class with how fast or slow we would sing and tap. It was really fun to contrast and experiment with tempo and dynamics. The students seemed to really enjoy the activity, and they were all very involved. We were able, by the end, to really gain good unity with our rhythm, too.

After I taught, Mrs. Larson had the class sing a couple of songs they learned from a previous music teacher. They all sang so beautifully, and even sang some words they wrote themselves. This was so helpful for me to get some ideas for what kind of music to bring for the children to learn to sing. What a great first meeting!

Here's some pictures of my adorable 3rd graders! I already love them all! The top two pictures are the boys, and the bottom two are the girls.