Helping students find DO and count rhythms

A choral resource for you! This is an information sheet that can help singers know where DO is and how to count rhythms for melodic sight-reading.  This link allows you to download in better resolution; the google drive folder has both the PDF and an editable Word version.

Echo songs, camp songs, and just-for-fun songs :)

As the year comes to a close, some of us may need some just-for-fun songs for our students. Most of these have something very easy for kids to pick up on right away, whether it's the echoes or the call and response or the movements. Enjoy!

Echo songs/call and response songs

·      Down by the Bay

·      My Aunt Came Back

·      Mama Llama

·      Moose song

·      A rig a bamboo

·      Charlie over the Ocean

·      John the Rabbit

·      Hill and Gully Rider

·      And the Sidewalk Went All Around

·      Wise Old Owl

·      I Got a Letter this Morning

·      Banana Boat Song

·      Scotland’s Burning

Camp songs/action songs/ other just-for-fun songs :)

·      Baby Shark

·      Bumblebee

·      Peanut Butter and Jelly

·      Father Abraham

·      Boom chicka boom

·      Rattlin’ Bog

·      Too-dee-ta

·      Jack, Can I Ride?

·      Apples and bananas

·      Aiken Drum

·      Alligator Pie

·      A Rick Tick Tickety Tick

·      One Bottle of Pop

·      A Ram Sam Sam

·      5 Little Monkeys

·      5 Green and Speckled Frogs

·      Do your ears hang low?

·      Welcome back to school, can you clap?

·      Head Shoulders Knees and Toes

·      This is a Story about Sammy

·      Little Bunny Foofoo

·      5 Little Monkeys

·      Here We Go Looby Loo (similar to Hokey Pokey)

·      Shake, Shake, Shake; or Shake My Sillies Out

·      Clapping Land

·      Ant Dance, or Action Leader

·      A-Hunting We Will Go

·      Wa-da-li-a-cha

·      Riddle Ree

Here is a powerpoint I made at the end of last school year with several camp songs' lyrics!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WKc6MzepTu438GmIzydBQ-Z_Xwg92l4v/view?usp=sharing

Beehive!

A new melody for an existing chant (not sure who wrote the chant). First graders love this song and set of activities!

• Day 1: Start the students on an ostinato sung on the resting tone on macrobeats: "1, 2, 3, bzz, 1, 2, 3, bzz," having them tap the macrobeat on their legs for the first three beats and on their shoulders on the buzz. Sing the song over the ostinato.  If you are using the words the first day of the song, display the words to students with bees, sees, hive, and five underlined, guiding them to notice that the "bzz" happens at those spots.  Then, have 5 students pretend to be the bees, walking around the outside of the circle on macrobeats, gently tapping one student's should only on the buzz parts of the ostinato. Have the bees perform a major or triple pattern, and appoint five new bees, singing the last line of the song as you choose them.

• Day 2: Have students flow during the song as if they are bees flying in curvy pathways. Use this free TpT bumblebee animated vocal exploration SMART board file to have students explore their head voices between repetitions, having one student come up to the front to click the smart board and echo a triple meter pattern. For other repetitions, have students move the ostinato from day 1 again, changing which body part they sting themselves on for the buzz every time.

• Day 3: Use the song for a locomotor movement activity. Guide the students to explore curvy and straight pathways ("beelines" 😃) around the room. Have them fly high or low. Have them find closed or small shapes like they are the bees hiding, or open and large shapes like they came out of the hive.  At the end of the activity, ask the students to "fly back to their nests" returning to their spots.

Other ways to vary or spiral the activity to other grades, depending on students' skill levels:

• Have one student hide a toy bee around the room like it is hidden in the beehive as the rest of the students close their eyes. When the song is over, have students open their eyes and point quietly when they see the bee. Someone who pointed quietly will get to hide the bee next, and anyone who gets a turn performs a triple or major pattern.

• Use the toy bee to go around to students during the song, pausing after every line to "sting" a student with a dramatic resting tone buzz! Invite the student you sing to perform the resting tone as well. 

• Have students find the DO SOL MI patterns and sing DO SOL MI on solfege or on BUM BUM BUM in the song every time it occurs. They could also look at the notation for that pattern if they are ready for symbolic association, or they could replace it with different major tonic patterns that they create singing or writing and singing.

• Have students sing chord roots (DO DO FA DO, DO DO SOL DO) and possibly transfer that to instruments.

• Connect to the major tonic patterns in the song by playing the major tonic game. My version of the game: Students listen to patterns and jump after they hear a major tonic pattern, singing "major tonic," and they squat after they hear a major dominant pattern, singing "major dominant." If they are incorrect they sit down where they are and are out until the next round. Perhaps add subdominant in there since it is part of the song's progression!

Notation is here if you want to edit or display it in higher quality to your students.

Let's Play in the Snow! Rhythm finding activities

"Let's Play in the Snow" from Jump Right In is a well-loved song for my students at this time of year!

 My 1st graders use it to create different movements based on different winter clothes they could put on (scarf, hat, snowpants, etc.), and once they know the song, they practice audiating parts or all of it!

They also pretend to build a snowman, echoing triple meter patterns or singing the resting tone as they put new pieces of the snowman on.

My 3rd graders use these files to practice finding rhythms in the song, doing the 3rd grade version of rhythmic dictation for some of these trickier rhythms!

File 1:  Powerpoint with rhythms for them to read first, then rhythms to find in the lyrics of the song.  This is their first introduction to reading quarter-eighth rhythms in 6/8 (DU-DI).

File 2:  SMART board file for them to practice dragging some of the rhythms to where they go as a class.

File 3:  Small group work where the kids take the cut-out rhythms and place them where they go in the song.  I laminated the paper and the cut-out rhythms so we could reuse them, but you also could have the kids cut and glue if you wanted.

All 3 files are here!  Enjoy!!!

Shake the Papaya Down: Visual, Chord root rhythm writing worksheet, and Garage Band projects

Lyrics and chord roots visual

Shake the Papaya Down lyrics and chord roots visual: you can download the free and editable Microsoft Word is here.

Shake the Papaya Down chord root rhythm worksheet: you can download the PDF for free here.

This is a great song for upper elementary because it has 3 partner songs, and the chord roots have I IV V I. You can have students sing the chord roots, label them as tonic, subdominant, and dominant, improvise rhythms over the chord roots, and even improvise with the chord tones.  After my 4th graders did their chord root rhythm composition, they worked with partners on a Garage Band project where they picked an instrument to play the chords, and they recorded themselves singing the partner  songs and chord root ostinato they composed.

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!  

Viennese Musical Clock movement to Rondo Form

Got this lesson from the amazing teacher I student taught with.  This video is too cute not to share!  

Students created all the movements in the video except the clock movement for the A section. The B, C, and D sections show the toy soldiers that come out on the hour. A student "conductor" points to where they are in the form. 

Lessons leading up to this:

• Reviewed AB and ABA form.

• Learned the term rondo form by making different forms out of the songs/chants "Hop Old Squirrel," "Whisky Frisky Hippity Hop" (both Jump Right In 1st grade), and "Gather acorns in the fall, little squirrel must do it all."

• Moved to this piece, Kodaly's Viennese Musical Clock, section by section then putting it all together, asking what form is it if we stop here? What form is it if we add this? 
• The original movements to Viennese Musical Clock:
• A section: move hands like the minute and hour hand of a clock
• B section: the toy soldiers come out and play trumpets
• A: clock again
• C: the toy soldiers salute on the beat
• A: clock
• D: the toy soldiers march (move locomotor for the B, C, and D sections once the kids know the piece)
• A: clock
• coda: arms up on the big chords! :)
• Finally, students came up with their own "toy soldier" movements. (This class chose swaying their arms, jumping, and marching locomotor.)

Niño Querido: A Round from Spain

A beautiful lullaby and round that you can use in English or Spanish (or without words, especially if you were using this with early childhood). A song with only I and V7 chords, so you can have the kids add Orff instrument parts on top of it (D, D, A, D) or sing the chord roots/chord tones in harmony (DO-DO-SOL-DO, MI-MI-FA-MI, SOL-SOL-SOL-SOL).

Noteflight notation is here.

7 Habits songs: Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw

Habit 7 version 1: song

This is a 4-chord song written to sound like a pop song to fit the theme of having fun and renewing yourself, which defines Sharpen the Saw. :)

A cute rhythm creativity, chant composition activity. Great for Orff teachers too because the kids compose 4-measure chants listing their favorite things to do when they Sharpen the Saw. 

Student creativity for the song:  Students create their own chants listing 4 things they do to sharpen the saw.  Perform as a rondo: in the A section everyone sings the song, in the B/C/D/etc. sections each small group performs their 4-macrobeat chant twice.

Noteflight notation for version 1 of the song can be found here.

Habit 7 version 2: duple chant

Habit 7's chant notation is on Noteflight here.

Habit 7 version 3: longer song

In this version as well, students create 4-macrobeat chants listing what they do to sharpen the saw.
Noteflight notation for version 3 of the song is found here.

7 habits songs: Habit 1: Be Proactive

This year my school is starting to be a Leader in Me school, teaching the students the 7 Habits of Happy Kids (/Highly Effective People) as our character ed program.

So I decided that one way I am going to teach these habits in the music classroom is through a short song for EACH individual habit. Here's Habit 1!
The other 7 Habits songs are all here.

Habit 1 melody notation is on Noteflight here.

Habit 1 melody + ostinato notation is on Noteflight here.

This song has entirely I and V chords, so you can layer it with tonic/dominant ostinati (one example is below), put the with Orff instruments, have kids improvise over the chord roots....you name it!

The song also leaves 3 beats to audiate after "Stop and think," so you can work on audiating rhythm or dominant as well. :)





The YouTube recording here is my favorite ALL-7-habits song. So cute!