Spooky Season! Students across grade levels were engaged in a variety of units. I’ll give a quick breakdown for each grade. Where there are pictures or videos, I’ll add those too.

3K

3K musicians learned to sing a song to begin our music class. They are learning songs that help with transitions, taking turns, and learning start and stop signals.

Pre-K

Pre-K musicians are learning to make their way to the music room and to find their way around inside of it. They are learning about their singing voices through interactive play with Melody the Singing Elephant and interactive stories like “5 Little Pumpkins.” They are singing songs and saying rhymes in English and Spanish.

Kindergarten

Kindergarten is exploring movement in general space with songs on the theme of movement. The Magic Box decides what our movement will be when we sing “Look at How I’m Walking.” The lyrics in “A la Rueda, Rueda” tell us the motions and actions in Spanish. Kindergarten musicians also are learning transition songs like, “Let’s Make a Circle,” “Follow Me,” and the Lineup Song.

Grade 1

Grade 1 musicians started every class with the hello song “Hello to All the Children of the World.” This song helps with transitioning to music class and related to the theme of “many voices, many languages” musicians at 896 are exploring. This month, they sang songs about the stars: “Star Light” and “Twinkle, Twinkle.” “Star Light” introduced them to music room pitched percussion instruments the metallophone and xylophone. With “Twinkle” they sang in English, Mandarin, and Spanish. They played along to their own singing while playing on percussion instruments.

Grade 2

Grade 2 musicians learned to sing a round called “Let us Sing Together,” where we start singing the same song at different times.

In Grade 2 we explored the classical music of India with Falu Shah of the Carnegie Hall Musical Explorers program.

“On Halloween” the Magic Box turns us into spooky creatures while we explore the music room with our movement!

Grade 2 explored movement with the theme of Fall with the song “Jump Jim Joe.”

Grade 3

Grade 3 musicians are learning to play the ukulele. This month they learned to hold the instrument and to make chords with their left hands. They can play the chords F and C7. They learned songs with movements to play along with the ukulele and xylophone like “Bow Wow Wow.”

Grade 4

Grade 4 musicians are learning Native American traditional music with dances and games from various North American tribal traditions. They met the artist Martha Redbone who shared songs with them from Cherokee and Choctaw nations. This month, they began to study the recorder.

Grade 5

Grade 5 musicians learned to play West African percussion instruments and sing the song “Funga Alafia.” They are learning the concept “Form” through group play exercises. Form is the overall plan or roadmap for a piece of music, they are learning how this concept guides a performance. Students played melodies on the xylophone and the recorder according to their interest and as part of a rotation. Using spoken word patterns, they learned to play the other percussion instruments, the drums, shekeres, and bells, along to their singing.