Holiday sing-along PowerPoint file

If your school does a holiday sing-along, I've uploaded a file that has 14 common Christmas songs (all secular except Silent Night) and 1 Hanukkah song.  The slides have nice pictures and even some animations on them that the kids love! Feel free to download and edit for your own purposes!

These are the songs in the PowerPoint:  

1. Jingle Bells –2 verses

2. Deck the Halls - 3 verses 

3. Frosty the Snowman  

4. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer –once without echoes, once with echoes ("like a lightbulb!" etc.) 

5. All I Want for Christmas is my 2 Front Teeth – twice through

6. Jolly Old St. Nicholas - 3 verses

7.  Up on the Housetop –all 3 verses 

8. Winter Wonderland 

9. Feliz Navidad 

10. Silent Night – 2 verses 

11. Bidi Bom – Hanukkah song (melody notated)

12. 12 Days of Christmas 

13. Santa Claus is Coming to Town (the traditional version) 

14. Jingle Bell Rock

15. We Wish You a Merry Christmas

The holiday sing-along PowerPoint can be downloaded 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!  

Holiday hello song #2: based on Sing We Now of Christmas

A 5/8, secular, hello song based on the Dorian tune "Sing We Now of Christmas."  The Noteflight notation is here if you'd like to adapt it for yourself.


Some possibilities for classroom activities with the song:

• You could do the song in duple or triple meter instead of 5/8 and use it to have students echo specific LSA patterns in between repetitions of the song.  

• You could do the song without words for early childhood or lower elementary classes.

• Olaf activity: 

• Take a snowman prop and pretend he’s Olaf from Frozen. Tell the students we have to tell Olaf with our “BAH” rhythm words that he’s going to melt in summer! Olaf will say something to you, you repeat it back to him to tell him about how snow can’t be warm. Students echo rhythms after Olaf on "BAH.

• Decorating a Christmas tree activity: 

• Have students sit and move with flow like they are putting a string of lights around a tree.  
• Explore different levels of space based on how students are decorating the tree: 
• flow high to put the star on, 
• flow low to put presents under tree, 
• flow medium-high to put ornaments on,
• do ABA to combine star and presents with motion going high when song is high and low when song is low

•  Lift hands and put them down to sing 5-1.
•  Singing 5-1, individual students sing after the teacher: 
• “touch the top of the tree, bottom of the tree” 
• “ceiling, floor” 
• “head, toes” 
• “high, low”
• Students pretend to put something on the tree and "touch the tree" as they echo a tonal or rhythm pattern after the teacher.
• Repeat the song again, pretending to put more decorations on the tree with flow or beat movement.

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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.)

Ghostbusters move and freeze!

Got this Halloween idea from my mentor... Play the Ghostbusters theme song. They start the song by moving/dancing in self space.

When the kids hear the word "ghost" or "ghostbusters," they freeze. 

When they hear it again, they move. 

When they hear it again, they freeze. 

Etc.! 

They have to really be listening to the song to figure it out when to move and when to freeze!  You can add rules like they're out if they move when they should be frozen or vice versa.

Good body awareness activity. And the kids beg for it!

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.

Autumn rhythms to read!

Rhythms in 4/4, 6/8, and 3/4 to read! The rhythms are straight from the Learning Sequence Activities! Download them here!