Thanksgiving Music Dinner, Family Style!

So, we have one week until Thanksgiving break- with the Turkey Trot run all day next Thursday and a work day on Friday.  Because of this tomorrow I will be starting my last rotation with my Kinder-3rd graders as they are on a 4 day rotation.

My first graders have just learned ta & ti-ti and this morning I hustled to get those cards of my Thanksgiving Dinner Beat Strips printed out, laminated and cut.  Seeing as how I had tone-chimes this morning and took the half-day kinders during my lunch and plan times this was quite a feat and as a result I didn't have time to group the cards into baggies like I normally do. 

Then it hit me: this is Music Thanksgiving Dinner and we're going family style!!!  So, I pulled out some paper plates that I had in my cabinets.  I decided that since I have 30 kids in a class I would have them work in 6 groups of five each.  Each group would get three plates: one with "corn" (ta cards), one with "turkey" (ti-ti cards) and one with "gravy" (ti-ti).  

I explained to the students that we were having Thanksgiving dinner, music room style.  In their groups, one person was going to come up and get their "food" from the counter (I had all three plates stacked on top of each other so there was a total of three plates in each of the six piles) and one person from their group would come get their individual plates (their beat strips) and "set their table."  (a.k.a. pass out the beat strips to their group.)  They were to remember that they were at a family style dinner so if they needed a turkey card (for instance) they would have to ask someone "at their table" to pass the turkey.

The result was so much fun!!!  Here's a sample of one group starting their dinner (the little red head on the left is my son!):

Here's another group that had filled their plates.  Once they're plates were full, they were to have a dinner conversation with the people sitting at their "table."  That is, they were to read the pattern that they wrote to the rest of the students in their group or to the person sitting next to them:

Here's another one of my son finishing up his dinner plate:

This group had a lot of fun and added their own extensions.  They first decided that they would put their two plates together and read all 8 beats that their two plates created. Then they decided that the whole table should read all of the cards without stopping.

This turned out to be so much fun, especially since  my time was limited to get their individual packets together and I had the idea to go "family style."  I'll definitely do it this way in the future and I might even adapt my other beat card activities to have they same manipulative distribution! :)