Iconic Rhythm Patterns

If your child attends Journey Montessori they may have brought a note card home today with their name on one side and some lines on the other.  This probably looks very confusing!  We are working on recognizing rhythmic patterns.  Until now the students have echoed rhythm patterns that I clap or play, or created their own using vocal sounds.  Now they are matching the rhythm pattern with an icon.  This is very similar to the way that we learn to talk and read.  First we learn to make sounds and words by echoing and experimenting ourselves, next we learn to identify our ABC's, and then we learn to put them together to form words and sentences.  The children are learning to match what they hear to the icons they see.  The lines on one side of their note card match up with how many claps their name gets (or the number of syllables their name has).  The students learned how to clap their names, then we drew lines for each of the claps on their card.  The lines are the way we are representing the rhythm their name creates.  The students are just looking at the icons (lines) not the notes themselves yet but for those of you who are curious where this activity is leading here are the note values that lines correspond with;
   

Another activity we do in class that uses icons to create rhythm patterns is using note cards that have stickers on them.  One of the note cards has the following stickers on it:

By using the icons (fruit) the children have clapped a four beat rhythm pattern!  Once they have mastered reading rhythm patterns using the icons then we would change the icon to the note and clap the rhythm pattern that way.

West Music Go Waggaloo Rhythm Package on Sale

West Music

Check out this great kids rhythm package that is on sale at West music right now.  It's a great deal for a set of instruments the whole family can use together!  You can preview the songs on the Go Waggaloo CD at amazon.com by using the links below.


Go Waggaloo
Don't I Fit In My Daddy's Shoes?
Bright Clear Day
Fox And The Goose
Oni's Ponies
Big Moon
`Cuz We're Cousins
                                   She'll Be Comin' `Round The Mountain
                                   Take Me To Show-And-Tell
                                   Oh How He Lied
                                   If Mama Had Four Hands
                                   Brush Your Teeth Blues # 57
                                   Big Square Walkin'

Babies Are Born to Dance

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20100315/sc_livescience/babiesareborntodance

• 
  
  146 votes
• Send
• Share
• Print

AFP/File – Babies who hear two languages regularly when they are in their mother's womb are more open to being …

LiveScience Staff

LiveScience.com – Mon Mar 15, 3:25 pm ET

Babies love a beat, according to a new study that found dancing comes naturally to infants.

The research showed babies respond to the rhythm and tempo of music, and find it more engaging than speech.

The findings, based on a study of 120 infants between 5 months and 2 years old, suggest that humans may be born with a predisposition to move rhythmically in response to music.

"Our research suggests that it is the beat rather than other features of the music, such as the melody, that produces the response in infants," said researcher Marcel Zentner, a psychologist at the University of York inEngland. "We also found that the better the children were able to synchronize their movements with the music, the more they smiled."

To test babies' dancing disposition, the researchers played recordings of classical music, rhythmic beats and speech to infants, and videotaped the results. They also recruited professional ballet dancers to analyze how well the babies matched their movements to the music.

During the experiments, the babies were sitting on a parent's lap, though the adults had headphones to make sure they couldn't hear the music and were instructed not to move.

The researchers found the babies moved their arms, hands, legs, feet, torsos and heads in response to the music, much more than to speech.

Though the ability appears to be innate in humans, the researchers aren't sure why it evolved.

"It remains to be understood why humans have developed this particular predisposition," Zentner said. "One possibility is that it was a target of natural selection for music or that it has evolved for some other function that just happens to be relevant for music processing."

Zentner and his colleague Tuomas Eerola, from the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Interdisciplinary Music Research at the University of Jyvaskyla, in Finland, detailed their findings in the March 15 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

• Video: Babies Bounce to the Beat
• Newborn Babies Cry in Native Tongue
• 10 Things You Didn't Know About You

• Original Story: Babies Are Born to Dance

LiveScience.com chronicles the daily advances and innovations made in science and technology. We take on the misconceptions that often pop up around scientific discoveries and deliver short, provocative explanations with a certain wit and style. Check out our science videos, Trivia & Quizzes and Top 10s. Join our communityto debate hot-button issues like stem cells, climate change and evolution. You can also sign up for freenewsletters, register for RSS feeds and get cool gadgets at the LiveScience Store.

Learning 9/8 Time Signature Isn't So Hard To Do

For those of you who are registered to start the spring session of Music Together in Fort Mill (Starting Thursday, March 25 at 9:30, there's still time to register!) we will be doing a piece in the Tambourine Collection that goes:

12   34  56  789
Hip hip hip hippity
12   34   56   789
Hap hap hap happity
12    34   56  789
Hop hop hop hoppity
123       146       789
Hippity, happity, hoppity, clap, clap.

It is in 9/8 time signature which means it's a rhythm that most of our ears are not used to hearing. While this all may seem difficult to us adults, children don't know that. If you want to get a head start and hear what the rhythm sounds like listen to Dave Brubeck's Blue Rondo Al A Turk. Whether you are in the Music Together class or not this is a great song to listen to.

Little Princess Goodnight

Little Princess Goodnight is poem that we turned into a sound story in the Montessori class.  A sound story is when you take a poem or a story and add instruments/or sounds to help tell it.  In this poem the princess, her animals, and some other key words get sounds to help tell the story.  First we read the poem and picked out the key words, and identified what color the words were.  Next the students assigned each key word an instrument that they felt was appropriate for that word.  The last step was to assign parts and wait for their turn to play.  They did a great job of identifying the words and colors and waiting too play.

Once upon a time 

There was a Princess.

A lovely Princess.

She put her unicorn under her pillow.

She put her dragon under her bed. 

She put her peacock under her chair.

She put her mouse under her slipper.

And then she crept into bed and fell asleep.

But not the mouse.

The mouse crept out form under the slipper,

  and pinched the peacock under the chair.

The peacock crept out from under the chair,

  and pinched the dragon under the bed.

The dragon crept out from under the bed,

  and pinched the unicorn under the pillow,

And the unicorn started to cry!

The little Princess awakened.

"Oh dear!" she said.  "What shall I do?"

She thought~~~~~~~~~~

and thought~~~~~~~~~~~~

and she thought~~~~~~~~~~~

and thought~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Then.....

Little Princess Goodnight jumped out of bed!!

She put her unicorn on top of her pillow.

She put her dragon on top of her bed.

She put her peacock on top of her chair.

She put her mouse on top of her slipper.

And she, Little Princess Goodnight,

Crept under her bed and went back to sleep.

She was a lovely Princess!!

The End.

The students figured out what the word crept meant in the context of the poem and that a soft instrument would be appropriate for the word.  In addition to putting instrument sounds to the colored words you can also put a sound for thought, and the exclamation points.  

Favorite Dance and Play Along Songs

One of my favorite play along songs is Buggy Ride played by Wynton Marsalis. Unfortunately I can't put the version I like from YouTube on here but if you click on the title it will link you to it.  It's a fun jazz song from the Charlie Brown soundtrack.  Have fun listening for jazz band instruments, (such as the saxophone, trumpet, trombone, bass, drums, and piano), playing along with instruments, and dancing.

Hoe-Down by Aaron Copland is another song I love to use with little ones.  We've danced to this song in almost every class I've taught.  Have fun pretending like you're cowboys out West riding your horses while listening to the orchestra play.  Listen for the horses to go fast, slow, jump, fall asleep, and go again!




More favorite songs to come soon....

Favorite Books

Rubber-Band Banjos and a Java Jive Bass is a book full of ways to mix the science of how sound works with fun do-it-yourself instruments.  Have fun finding things around the house and putting them together to make your own instruments.



















Chugga-Chugga Choo-Choo is a fun train story that goes along nicely with any train song.  Have fun watching the train go all around the house and listen to it's whistle blow! 




















Time For Bed by Mem Fox is a wonderful bedtime story and lullaby.  The song that fits with the book is "The Day Is Now Over," by Carl Orff.  The song can be found on page 19 in the Orff-Schulwerk Volume 1 book.  Time for Bed is a  rhyming book that has mother animals saying goodnight to their baby animals.  

Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb by Al Perkins is my favorite book. What's better than monkeys and drums. We used this book at the Montessori school to learn about crescendo (soft-loud) and decrescendo (loud-soft). We discussed the number of monkeys playing drums and how loud they would be. The children played sticks/drums only when they heard the drumming words, "dum ditty dum ditty dum dum dum."  Ask your children what crescendo and decrescendo  mean and have fun exploring these elements of music vocally and with instruments.

Fiddle-I-Fee is the Mother Goose rhyme that we used recently in the Montessori class.  We started off with a memory game singing first what the cat says "Fiddle-I-Fee," Then what the goose and cat say, etc.  After we sang the song and learned what all the animals say in order we added an instrument sound for each animal.  The students had to hold their instrument quietly until it was their animals turn in the song.  They did a wonderful job of watching the conductor and waiting their turn in our piece.  It was a great beginning experience in ensemble playing!  

Max Found Two Sticks by Brian Pinkney is a book we will be reading soon in the Montessori class.  This book is similar to the Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb and Fiddle-I-Fee activities where the students have to wait until they hear the drum sound to play.  We wait until later in the year for this one because Max plays more complex rhythms to imitate the sounds he hears in the book.  A great at home activity to follow up on this book is to listen for everyday rhythms and sounds around you and try to imitate their rhythms.  

More books to come soon!

Arirang

For those of you who took the Music Together Drums Collection, here are some great YouTube videos of Arirang, a traditional Korean folk song.

The first is of the New York Philharmonic playing Arirang.  Listen for the melody that we sang in class and pick out the instruments you see with your children.



The next video is of someone ice skating to Arirang.  This is fun to watch and may give you some good movement ideas.  Pretend like you are ice skating and use scarves while you dance like we did in class.



The last video is of a family singing the song together.  The grandparents are very old, and grandpa doesn't have teeth, but they still sing together.  It is always wonderful to see a family singing a traditional song together.



The Montessori students will be studying Asia soon.  We will sing Arirang in class, and discuss the difference in tonality between American folk songs and Asian folk songs.  Your children have studied the instruments families a little bit in class.  See if they can identify instruments in the orchestra while watching the New York Philharmonic play Arirang (in the above video).  If you need some help identifying the instruments and what families they belong in check out sfskids.org.  This is the San Fransisco Symphonies kids website and is a wonderful place to play.  I used this website when I was teaching public school to help the students learn their instruments and musical concepts.