For Thy Gracious Blessings

I don't know what you're Thanksgiving vacations look like, but I am VERY happy to announce that I'm on VACATION!!!  It's been a long fall.  Last year was our opening year and for some reason this year has been so much harder.  AND I'm in the middle of a big fundraisers so tomorrow I will be at school with two parent volunteers inputting Holiday Wreath orders.  But I digress. . .

Here's a round that I love to do this time of year.  It feel like it really matches the thankfulness of the season.  Teaching in a public school, I have never had complaints about the "L" word (Lord). . . but I've not tried it at my new school yet.  (However my 5th graders sang "Inscription of Hope" and that uses the phrase "I believe in God" and no one complained.)

Here's the round:

This is really a beautiful round.  It's wonderful to use for phrasing and expression.  And it works nicely with hand bells or tone-chimes; I have them play E and G on the first beat of each measure.

Have a good weekend everyone!

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On Thanksgiving

This is one that I got from Cindy McCaskill during my undergrad practicum/student teaching with her.  I'm pretty sure that it's from a textbook. . . not true Kodály, I know.  And it's changing the words of a folk song.  *Gasp. . . lol!  We Kodály teachers can take ourselves too seriously sometimes, huh?

It's based on "Are You Sleeping" or "Brother John" (a.k.a. Frére Jacques).  When my kiddos are in second grade we use "Brother John" to teach half note:

But in my Kodály training Jill Trinka argued that it should actually be notated in diminution of this notation.  If you've studied with Jill you know that she emphasizes that you notate music the way you hear it, the way you feel it and the way you sing it.  I really agree with her. . . so I use this as a way to briefly talk about diminution with my 3rd graders. . . it's pretty challenging but it's good for differentiation and challenging your TAG kiddos:

So, that was my long, drawn out way of explaining why I use the following notation.  It's great at this time of year with 3rd grade because it reinforces/practices reading rhythms with tika-tika and also is a great prep song for so,.  Here are the words:

Of course, this works really well as a round and having your students create their own movements for each phrase helps them sing it as a round with ease (in addition to helping them remember the words of the song).

Here's an Orff part that I wrote and use with my kiddos.  I'm not an Orff teacher, I would love to take level I soon (but I have a 2 year old and a 5 year old, so it's not happening anytime soon), so it's pretty simple.  With 3rd grade we're working on harmony and the alto xylophone emphasizes the use of an ostinato that we've been using a lot in class:

I have a new Turkey solfége game that I'll be posting about tomorrow. . . I'm trying it out tomorrow with my kiddos, wish me luck!

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Old Abram Brown

Here's a round that fun to do with your upper grades.  It's great because it contains ti, which is a melodic element that I focus on in 5th grade.  It's "eerie" without being Halloween based, so if you have students that don't celebrate Halloween this will work for you.

Here's the round:

I took four levels of Kodály at Portland State.  But when I did my masters at Colorado State University (with a Kodály emphasis) not all of my credits transfered and I took levels II and III (again: with Sue Liethold-Bowcock and Ann Eisen).  During choir at level II @ CSU Ginger Littleton used a choral arrangement of "Old Abram Brown" that was essentially the round, with ths coda (tag) at the end:

The kids love this round.  AND it works great on concerts!

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Little Leaves Are Falling

I LOVE this little song.  I have always loved how isolated do is at the end and have used it as kinesthetic preparation for that melodic concept.  However, last year I took inspiration from Tanya LeJeune to add some new movement to it.  This new movement really helped my second graders be able to sing it as a round.  Granted, we didn't do it as a four-part round, but they did get up to three parts (first year in a new school, I thought that was pretty good!)

Here's the song:

These are the leaves I use:

I found them at King Soopers (our local Kroger store) a couple years ago.  They are so realistic looking but surprisingly durable for the $1.00 that I paid for them!  They are fabric and we use them in kindergarten and first grade for Down Down, Yellow and Brown  so they've been prepped in "leaf etiquette". :)

Formation: standing circle, leaves on the ground in the middle of the circle and every student holding a leaf or two in each hand with arms raised and hands above their heads. 

Action:

1. "Little leaves are falling": with one hand, in a conducting like pattern, have the leaf (or leaves) in that hand float to your side, still holding onto the leaf.
2. "Falling everywhere":  with the other hand, do the same movement as the first phrase.
3. "Making all the tall trees": slowly raise arms up high above head, still holding onto the leaves.
4. "Look so very bare":  students either float their leaves to the ground, still holding onto them, or they can let them freely drop with their "branches" (a.k.a. their arms) still above their heads.  
1. The first way is a great physical prep for do: they actually touch the ground on the last and lowest note of the song.
2. The latter is a lot of fun visually as it looks like leaves falling from the tree, but if not prepped right can be a classroom management nightmare with students diving for leaves. 
5. Once your students have mastered this, try it as a round! :)

Another thing we do with this song is use the leaves on my felt staff board.  They are able to write out the so so so la so mi & so so so la so patterns on the staff, using the leaves for note heads.  Visually, we are also able to talk about the mystery note: that it is lower them mi.  Using the leaves, we show that one of the critical attributes of the mystery note is that it is a skip lower then mi.

Happy leaf singing!

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Ghost of Tom

This is a great round that I'm sure you're familiar with.  It's perfect for this time of year because it's fun to sing around Halloween AND (more importantly) it gets the kiddos singing in 4 parts:

Here's a movement activity I do with Ghost of Tom to encourage independent singing in this round and I've found it makes singing the round in 4 parts more successful.

Formation: standing circle

Action: 

Phrase 1: walk counter-clockwise in the circle, stepping the half note.

Phrase 2: walk clockwise in the circle, stepping the half note

Phrase 3:  turn in place 360 degrees, stepping the half note.

Phrase 4:  in place, lowly sink to a crouching position.

Once students have learned the song and these actions and can perform is as a group (lesson #1), we make two concentric circles (lesson #2).  One circle is assigned to start first.  This circle starts singing the song with the movements and the other circle waits until the moving circle is finished with the first phrase to begin singing the song from the beginning.  When the starting circle starts singing the second phrase, the second circle comes in on the first phrase.  As the round completes, we switch parts so that the starting circle is the circle that comes in second and the circle that came in second is the starting circle.  During later lessons we add circles until we have 4 concentric circles.  Visually, it's fun and the kinesthetic movement really helps the students with phrasing, independent singing and being able to successfully sing this round in 4 parts.

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Bread and Jam

One of the rituals when I took my Kodály levels at PSU was to for all the levels to warm-up together in the morning.  One morning Jill Trinka taught us this round:

I LOVE the round but it's pretty tricky for my kids to sing: the jump from do to high mi is really difficult for them.  So, I took the mi', re' and do' down an octave (as notated below) and use it with my 4th graders to reinforce fa.

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