We Are Dancing In the Forest, Disappearing Song PPT

Okay, the 4th la disappearing song PowerPoint is ready and I'm going to abandon la for a little bit.  I'm starting work on a couple do PPT's.  Those might be up this week or I might actually turn off the computer and not open it for 24 hours.  (cough, cough, we'll see)

Here's the We Are Dancing in the Forest Music Memory PPT:

We review the text of the song:

We sing it on rhythm syllables:

Then on solfa:

I'm going to be using this for melody so I'd have them sing it again on solfa, just for good measure.  But, if you're practicing rhythm then you would have them repeat the song on rhythm syllables:

Now, this is a longer song so I find that in aiding with memory work and preparing them for many musical skills we're going to analyze the form.  If they learn to do this now, just think of how this will help their sight reading skills, practicing skills (how many times have you had a private student get completely overwhelmed by a "long" piece but then once you broke it down and showed them the patterns it made practicing so much easier) and of course, memorization.

Now, we're looking at the phrasic form of the rhythm and melody.   Here's my school of thought, it has to be concrete to my 1st graders.  When studying with Jill Trinka the OVERALL form of this little song would be AAvAAv- because the form of the melody is AAvAAv and the rhythm is ABAB.  Granted, those would also be written in lower case letters but to make it easier to read I wrote them in uppercase (so you could see the "v" for variant.)   My 6-7 year olds need something more concrete then that.  So, I see the phrasic form of this song as ABAB (abab, in actuality, but again, that's for another debate/conversation depending on who your levels teacher(s) are).

So, in other words, we're breaking down the form in age-appropriate, concrete terms.

Of course the first phrase is "A":

Now the text on this next slide is hard to read because they are animated so you'll only see one at a time.  Basically, is asks, using the rhythm of A as our guide, what would we call the second phrase.  The rhythm is different so it will be "B."

Again, the text is messy in the JPEG because of the animation, but they'll compare the third phrase to the first two phrases and see that it's the same as "A."

Again, sorry for the messy text (I promise, it's not that way in the PPT), but then they compare the final phrase to previous phrases.

From there they'll read one of two "Disappearing Song" sets of slides where a wolf comes out and "swipes" the rhythms away.  The first in the PPT is with out the form guides that we just created.  This will be harder as it doesn't have that visual cue (that they can reference beats not yet taken away):

The other version has the form icons.  Again, this would be an easier way for the kiddos to remember the beats as they have that cue that the 1st and 3rd lines are the same and the 2nd and 4th lines are the same:

Finally, they'll sing it again with the text and I (personally) would transition them right into the game.

This is available at my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

Yesterday I posted about Treble Clef Playing Cards.  If you looked them up and went "yikes, I won't pay that much!" I don't know how I came up with that price!  So, those are $2.50 NOT $3.99.