Thanksgiving Dinner Fun

It's the week of Thanksgiving and we are all dreaming of the plate we will construct for Thursday's dinner.  Whatever your favorite, everyone's plate looks just a touch different even when the same dishes are on the table.  Level 3 students used Thanksgiving Dinner Rhythm Cards (click here for the TPT link) to create a rhythmic Thanksgiving dinner to perform for the class.

Some groups went back for seconds (it's hard not to on Thanksgiving!).

Students performed their Thanksgiving dinner rhythms for the class on the drums.  Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

2nd Grade goes cloud watching

The 2nd grade singers went cloud watching this week in the music room.  

I found these fantastic music clouds on Cherie Herring's blog Just a Little More (click here for link) and placed them on my ceiling this year.  The students cloud watched for the melodies I sang (all included So, La and Mi- the three notes we have been studying this trimester).  Then the students partnered up and cloud watched together, taking turns finding and singing the melody or rhythm found on the cloud.

Cloud watching in Music

1st Grade Composers

First grade has been listening for high and low sounds as well as short and long sounds this month.  This past week, students attempted to write music on their risers using paper plates.

The Writing Process

Checking work with the team

High and low are a skip apart on the music staff, so the students used their risers as their staff.  Each group did a beautiful job skipping the step between our high sound and our low sound.  Some students wrote the song "See Saw" while others invented new songs during our writing activity.

UPDATE!!! Miss Mary Mack IS Back!!!

We have exciting news to share about our question 'How can Lincoln's 3rd Grade keep hand clapping games alive on our playground?'

We have been collecting data during lunch recess about hand clapping games.  Our questions included the following:

• Do you see anyone playing hand clapping games?
• Number of kids playing in the group
• Grade level of kids playing
• Use of nonsense words
• Use of challenging movements

The first two times we went out, we saw not a single student playing hand clapping games.  The 3rd grade started to play games we learned in class out on the playground during lunch recess and would you believe, that we are starting to see these games catch on?  This week, we have seen as many as 10 groups playing and the students playing are from all grade levels!  This is exciting to see on our playground!

We've learned that hand clapping games are fun, but we do not know enough games to keep them from growing stale.  Each group of 3rd grade students (4-5 in a group) have been given the task of creating a new hand clapping game to present to our playground.  We have been working hard and are ready to show our work!

3rd graders are busily prepping for a practice presentation at the end of this week.  Hopefully, we will all hear some good feedback as to what is going well and what needs some attention.  We will present our new games to some experts on December 4th.  Our experts include music teachers, local college music professors, playground supervisors, and administration.  Wish us luck!  Check out some pictures of our work in progress: