Mrs. Potatohead activity for finding singing voice

 I'm sharing a few activities I haven't posted yet!  This one is a favorite of 1st graders and is excellent for including individual response to help them find singing voice. You can even include a guesser trying to figure out who sang one of the items to make a game out of it!

I've used it on informances in the past, including having student leaders singing the call part at the end. As the kids are still passing pieces of Mrs. Potatohead to someone else who is closing their eyes and moving with flow, after the Mrs. Potatohead song as shown below is done, I pair the song with the Mixolydian song "Tiptoe" from Experimental Songs and Chants without Words.

A clearer version of the notation can be found here.

Christmas circle game: tonal creativity focus

I do this with the song "Santa Claus is Comin' to Town," as a way to take a song from my school's holiday sing-along and make an MLT classroom activity out of it. You could also substitute any Christmas song for it.  Here's the game:

• All students sit in the circle and keep the beat to the song.  Choose 1 kid to be the first Santa.  Santa creates a major tonal pattern (at Aural/Oral or Verbal Association, whichever level your students are at), and all students repeat that pattern after Santa.

• Then everyone except Santa closes their eyes, and Santa chooses one of two very small toys to hold in their hand.  This could be any 2 items small enough to fit in a child's hand; I use two tiny polar bears, one with red on the bottom and one with green.  One of the toys represents "Naughty" and the other represents "Nice."  (With the 2 toys I use, the red polar bear is naughty and the green one is nice.)

• Santa hides the toy they picked in their hand, and the teacher hides the toy Santa DIDN'T pick in the teacher's own hand.

• Then Santa walks around the inside of the circle to the beat of the song as all students sing.  Santa can even move as if they're carrying a heavy bag of toys, adding heavy movement exploration to the activity.  At the end of the song, whoever Santa lands in front of guesses whether Santa has the Naughty toy or the Nice toy in their hand.  If they are right, they get to be the next Santa. If they are wrong, the same kid gets to be Santa again. After they guess, whether they're right or wrong, they share their own tonal pattern for the class to repeat!

• If the guesser was wrong, all kids close their eyes again and the same Santa gets to either change which toy they have or keep the same one.  If the guesser was correct, the guesser is the new Santa and picks the toy as all kids close their eyes!  

Simon Sings!

Think Simon Says, but to help the kids think about the difference between singing voice and speaking voice.

You don't use the words Simon Says at all.  You simply give an instruction either using your singing voice or your speaking voice. The students are only to follow the instructions you SING, not the ones you speak in the game. If a student follows a direction you SPEAK, they're out and they sit down!

I like to improvise in Dorian or Phrygian mode to give the directions in the game. You also can sing tonic and dominant patterns in major or minor tonality, later adding in subdominant patterns. The purpose is for the kids to practice and for you to assess how they're doing with hearing the difference between singing and speaking voice!



Extension:

If my students are REALLY good at hearing singing vs. speaking (which my K and 1st graders are!), I make it even trickier for them!  If I sing the directions on the RESTING TONE, they should follow them, but if I sing the directions on ANY OTHER NOTE, they shouldn't follow them!  This helps me assess whether students are truly audiating which pitch is the resting tone!

All Around the Daffodils game

Materials:  2 fake daffodils

Students stand in a circle, holding hands up. Two students get fake daffodils that they will give to other students. The 2 students weave in and out of the circle, finally landing in front of someone at the end of the song. The person they each land in front of sings the resting tone of the song and gets the daffodil. Then they weave in and out of the circle, landing in front of someone else!




Alternative movement from http://www.letsplaykidsmusic.com/easter-spring-song-daffodils/ :

The children stand in a circle and hold hands up high to form arches or windows. One child  is chosen to hold the small bunch of (fake) daffodils, and starts to weave in and out of the windows. As the words ‘just choose me!’ are sung, the first child takes the hand of whoever is the closest, and then the two children carry on going in and out of the windows. The song is repeated until all the children are holding hands in a long snake, an adult can make a bridge against the wall, and then they all go round and under the bridge for a last time.  

Hiding Eggs: Easter song and game!

Easter Game:

Teacher passes out plastic Easter eggs, one per child.  Students can hide them in one of 4 places:  in their lap, behind their back, in their hands, or in the bottom of their pant leg.  Teacher turns away from the class and sings the song as students hide their eggs (in my classes, we only used verse 1).  The teacher turns back toward the class when the song is over, and guesses where one student's egg is.  Then that student sings the resting tone of the song.

If the teacher gets it right, the teacher gets 1 point.

If the teacher gets it wrong, the class gets 1 point.

If the student uses their best singing voice for the resting tone, the class gets 1 point.

If anyone in the class is talking during the music, the teacher gets 1 point. ;)

Then the students hide their eggs again as the teacher turns away and sings the song.  The teacher guesses another student's egg's hiding place, and that student sings the resting tone. The game continues until either the teacher or the class get to 10 points! Whoever gets there first wins! 

Side note: Kindergarteners love this because they love tricking the teacher and beating the teacher in a game!  And as long as my students aren't talking, giving me points, the class pretty much always wins. :)

Valentine game and minor song!

Song used: Valentine, Valentine, I'm searching for a Valentine (Jump Right In! book, Grade 1)

Materials:  small foam or paper hearts (2-6 of them)

Students sit in a circle with their eyes closed. First the teacher walks around the circle behind the kids, and hands out one heart each to 2-6 kids (depending on how many kids you want singing the pattern in between times through the song).

When the song is over, the teacher is back in his/her seat, and students open their eyes to look behind themselves and see if they got a heart. If they got a heart, they echo a minor tonic pattern in D minor after you (MI-DO-LA works great with this song since it's in the melody).

The students who just echoed patterns pass their hearts to new students as the rest of the class closes their eyes, getting back to their seats by the time the song is over. And the game continues!




Alternatives:

• Students could listen to the music for how many times they hear MI-DO-LA in the melody.
• Students could look at the notation of the music for where they see MI-DO-LA in the notation.
• Students could create a minor tonic pattern or minor melody instead of echoing after the teacher.

***Easter alternative of this song***:

I've also heard this song used with the words "Hiding eggs" at the beginning; however, I can't remember the rest of the words. But it could be used as an Easter activity too with revised words!

Who has the ___? Singing voice game

One of my favorite singing voice games that I've seen work WONDERS in bringing out kids' singing voices is based on the song Frere Jacques/Are You Sleeping.

Here is the original version of the game:

Teacher tosses small stuffed animals to students, or hides items behind their backs.

Teacher sings (to the tune of Are You Sleeping): "Who has the brown bear?"
Child who has it sings in echo: "I have the brown bear!"
Teacher sings: "Who has the dog?"
Child who has it sings: "I have the dog!"
Teacher sings: "Who has the black bear?"  (the hardest line to sing, so out of the 3 kids with turns this round, the child with the highest aptitude should get this one!)
Child who has it sings: "I have the black bear!"
Teacher sings: "Pass them on, pass them on" as students pass their toys to other students.



Here's a new twist on it with a focus on resting tone, for the younger kids who are still primarily focusing their singing voice work on finding the resting tone:

Same game as above, but the students sing "ME!" on the resting tone, instead of echoing the entire line. See below!

This can be done with ANY set of 3 items. Examples:
marker, pen, eraser;
rainbow, gold, leprechaun;
spider, ghost, witch;
tiger, bear, lion;
etc.!

I usually try to make the second item the one with the shortest name, because of the half note in the music in measure 3.

Happy singing! :)