Pumpkin Pumpkin

Phew, what a busy month September was! Looking back, I barely posted this month!!

I have to admit, I'm glad that October is here. I LOVE fall. . . I love the change of the season and I'll be honest, I love the fun music repertoire that Halloween brings.

One of my favorites is Pumpkin, Pumpkin.  I use this in 3rd grade.  My students learn tika-tika in the early fall and they already are able to read the do-pentatonic scale so it's completely accessible for the students to read the rhythm, solfa and absolute pitch names.

Here's the song:

I teach a dance mixer that I thought was totally original. . . and right after I "created" it I went to a ROCKE workshop with Sanna Longden and she did almost and identical dance with it!

Formation:  Single circle, facing partners.

Action:

1. On "pumpkin pumpkin round and fat" the pattern is pat-clap-pat-clap-pat-clap-partner (both hands patting partners' hands)
2. "Turn into a jack-o-lantern"- with hands touching paterner's hands, trade places with partner
3. "Just like that"- pat parterner's hands three times then jump and turn 180 degrees to face a new partner
4. The dance continues until you return to your first partner.

Here's an extention activity with Pumpkin Pumpkin as a mystery song:

Here's to a Happy October!! :)

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Bugler's Dream

Alright, here's a mystery song for you (don't look at the title of this post, lol!):

Okay, so I gave it away, oops!  Yesterday I saw a few of my Kodály friends put the solfege for this on their facebook status.  I thought, what great do pentatonic review for 3-5 grade when we get back to school so I had to make this power point.  The three slides above I'm going to use with 3rd, 4th and 5th grade when we're reviewing the do pentatone as a "Mystery Song" during the high concentration portion of their lesson.  The rhythm contains elements that have not been taught in any of these grade levels, so one way I represented rhythmic duration is through the placement of the solfa below four hearts that are representative of the beat.

I need to preface the next section:  I LOVE power points.  I love that you can easily manipulate them for however you want to use them by adding, rearranging or deleting slides.  I will be doing that with this power point to make it applicable to the grade that I'm using it with.  Third and fourth grades will not see the next few slides.  They will skip from this slide to the slide that presents the name of the mystery song (the slide with the Olympic Rings below that says "Bugler's Dream).

My fifth graders will start preparing tim-ka this fall, so I have added these slides for that purpose.  Once tim-ka is presented, we will bring back these slides and read it with the new rhythm, as a mystery song:

With all three of those grade levels, once they have sang the solfa successfully, they will derive the mystery song.  I'm sure they don't know the exact title of the song, but they'll easily recognize it as the Olympic Theme (unless they were visiting Jupiter this August, lol!).  I will duplicate the slides accordingly to match the recording that I have.  I found a relatively short (45 second) version on iTunes that works really well:

These slides, of course, are for 5th grade and will be used for reading once tim-ka is presented:

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