Black Cat Extension Activities

A couple weeks ago I blogged about the song, "Black Cat".  Well, my first graders are in full-fledged-quarter rest preparation so we will be using this song and PowerPoint this week in class.

Just to review, here's the song:

 Here's the PowerPoint from which they will be singing and reading the song:

With this slide they will be asked to keep a steady beat while singing the song:

With the next two slides they will sing the song while clapping the rhythm.  We will draw attention to the symbols that are not cats and derive that these "magic/sparkle" symbols represent beats with no sound.

We will the replace the iconic representation with the rhythm symbols that we know, which are ta and ti-ti, and read them using those rhythmic duration syllables.

In the following lesson, working in pairs, they will use two beat charts to create the first phrase of the song, like this:

I found the little black-cat erasers at Target this year.  I feel like I've been their spokes-person lately, but they had a lot of good finds lately.  (thanks Tanya!!!)  And if you talk with your kiddos about the form of the song on the day you use the PowerPoint, you can derive that every phrase is the same AND that they can use the two beat charts above four times to "read" and track the entire song.

After we present rest (even though it will be after Halloween), we will come back to the song and read the rhythm using the following two slides:

The PDF of this song wil be added to my Halloween File, to be posted to my Teachers Pay Teachers store in October, 2013.