A Peek At My Week

I saw that Aileen had linked up for a new blog party, and with MY CRAZY week I thought this is was actually a blog that I can do right now.  So, I'm linking up with Mrs. Laffins Laughings for her "Peek at my Week" Party.

 My kindergartners are, like all kinders, working on comparatives. We're getting into short and long sounds.    Last year I found these cute finger puppets at Oriental Trading.  Each child gets one to use during class and they used them almost the entire lesson yesterday.  We started with vocal exploration exercises where their bees followed mine (echoed)

Then we used a bunch of the songs from this collection on my Teachers Pay Teachers store:

With the bees they were "worker bees" and had to listen to the queen bee (me, you know, it's great to bee queen, right?!  And no, I didn't just spell bee wrong, tee hee!!).  With many of the singing games we were either keeping the beat or the rhythm.  We also did the finger play, "Here Is The Bee Hive" and some of them liked to put their bee puppet into their hive.  

In the second lesson this week we'll be reading the lyric slides

And looking at the beat slides

And starting to look at the iconic rhythmic representation for the rhythm:

Now, my 1st and 2nd graders this month are in concert prep mode.  My first graders are performing a concert themed, "Songs America Loves to Sing".  We are a core knowledge school and they're learning American symbols so we have a couple patriotic songs. And then we're also singing a Pete Seeger song, and "On the Good Ship Lollipop" (we have talked a little bit about Shirley Temple) and then some great folk songs.  Second grade's concert is "Singing 'Round the Campfire" so we've got some great call-response songs, cumulative songs and fun camp songs.

My third graders and my choir & hand bells have a concert tonight.  So, after today my third graders will be getting make to a more traditional music lesson.  We'll be using some of the St. Patrick's Day files that I've made.

My 4th and 5th are delving more into the treble clef and working on fluency.  I'm working on a HUGE file that will be in my Teachers Pay Teachers store later this week called "The Treble Clef is AWESOME!".

Last week we reviewed, here are a couple snippets of some slides from "teaching the treble clef" ppt:

Last week they also took a pretest:

And this week they're starting time tests.  Some have passed this so they'll move onto 60 seconds next week:

They've worked with matching cards. These are the harder cards that 5th grade worked with:

And the game that I'm pumped up about this week is the "Where's my pants" game.  If you've seen the Lego movie, or your students have talked about it, this is a little "Game Show" that they have in the movie.  So, this is my "Treble Clef Builder" set version of the game.

The point of the game is to help the builder find his missing pants.  There are 9 builders that need help.  First, teams select a builder:

Then, they must help the builder find his pants by matching the word on his shirt to the correct staff notation:

If they are correct, they see this slide:

If they miss it, they see this slide and have the chance to try again:

So, that's a little bit of my week!  I hope you all are doing amazing!!  Like I mentioned, the "Treble Clef is Awesome" file will be available later this week.  And then I'll be finishing up the "Bass Clef is Awesome".  I'll also be working on a lines and spaces version of the file, as well as a recorder and solfége version of the file.  Phew, I have my work cut out for me, lol!