Musical Pen Pals 5

Today, Mrs. Tuell's class finished their musical pen pal video to send to Donegal Primary School.  They selected "Fast Dance," an Orff instrument arrangement from Music for Children: Vol. 2 (American Edition).  Our journey with this piece of music started as a form review.  The original piece is performed as ABA form, however, we only learned the A section of the song for our performance.  The students also used this piece to review contours and harmony.

After the entire class learned the melody, we worked on adding two different simple ostinati as our harmony.  I helped the students to identify parts that they were successful with and we determined who would play each part.  The students were also challenged to add movement to this piece and body percussion was agreed upon.  After designing the body percussion movement, several students volunteered to be in movers instead of instrumentalists for our performance.  We video taped several times and discussed our progress in our videos.  A final form was decided (intro, A section with movement, A section with glockenspiel harmony added, coda) and we are excited to be sending out our final performance today.

Take a look at what Mrs. Tuell's class created:

Musical Pen Pals 4

Recently, Mrs. Melvin's 2nd grade class at Bainbridge Elementary finished their video for our musical pen pals at Donegal Primary School.  Mrs. Melvin's group picked the song "Hunt the Cows," which they learned to highlight AB form, and the note "do".  The song already had a great movement game to show the form of the song. The students had to create some instrumental parts to add to our performance to make it more interesting for our viewers and more challenging for the performers.

The students added a chordal accompaniment using C, D and G boomwhackers.  Of course, what would "Hunt the Cows" be with out a little cow bell?  The students decided to use the cow bell only during the B section, every time we sang the note "do", which highlighted the movement of the game.  The students also designed the spoken introduction that you will see in the video.

I invited our Principal, Mr. Kiehl to help us out with the video.  Mr. Kiehl knows the principal at DPS and we are hoping that their principal, Mr. Miller, will take part in the videos too!  The students voted on which part Mr. Kiehl should play and taught him how to play his part.

Before taping the students watched a preliminary taping of their performance and discussed ways to make their performance even more successful.  Take a look at what they created: