Angry Birds=Vocal Exploration?

Okay, I must give credit to my son for this one. Yesterday we had Christmas pictures taken my two kids and my two lovely nieces. We've had two gift cards to "Build a Bear" that we've been carrying around for years so we thought that would be a fun surprise while we waited for the pictures to be developed. Well, my two could have cared less about stuffing a bear. Instead, my daughter fell in love with a little dog (affectionately named "Doggie Dog) and my son found this angry bird:

Now, the bird's name is a little difficult to write, so I'm going to try to explain it. I guess if I wrote it it would be "Ice OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO-Ding!". Usually he just calls it "OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO-Ding", at which he pretty consistently sings on a B above middle C- according to my husband it's very similar to the sound that the ice bird makes from Angry Birds.

It really is a nice little head voice sound that he gets when he says "OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO-Ding"'s name. This morning (while showering, because isn't that were all great ideas occur?) I got to thinking about how much fun my students would have using the Angry Bird idea for vocal exploration.

One idea is to actually ask Noah if I could borrow "OOOOOOOOOOOO-Ding". Well, from the picture above you can see that "OOOOOOOOOOO-Ding" has already been promoted to prime bed-real estate in his bedroom and ANY ONE that's watched Toy Story knows all about that, right?!

Then I thought about how my good friend and colleague Loretta had made some animated PowerPoint slides for vocal exploration. So, using some Angry Birds background and clip art I was able to generate the following slides. The HUGE downfall is that you can't see the animation. I tried saving the PPT as a movie but that just shows the pictures of the slides.

The general idea is I put an angry bird on every slide. When you click the slide, or advance it, the bird flys on the screen and the students would follow the bird's flight on an "Oooo", making their pitch get higher when the bird goes up and their pitch get lower then the bird flies down. Of course, some birds do "loops" and the blue birds even split into three at one point, just like in the Angry Birds game.