Silver and Gold

What can I say, I love this song!  Sam the Snowman sings it in the old "Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer" show and it reminds me of watching those as a young kid.  Looking back, in the movie it really has an important message about values.  Here's the song:

I put the lyrics into a PowerPoint so the students can sing and read the lyrics:

What can I say, 5th grade is in full-fledged tom-ti practice and what's nice about them reading the rhythm of this song is that it's in 3/4 meter.  While we are practicing tom-ti now, next year I might be preparing tom-ti with 4th grade by this point (my 3rd graders are just that kind of class, they pick up things really fast).  Here are a couple samples of the preparation slides:

Since we are practicing, here are a couple of the practice slides in my PowerPoint that 5th grade will read next week:

And here's what the whole song looks like with solfa added to the slides:

I mentioned in an earlier post that my friend Tanya LeJeuene posted an article on Facebook about how neglected 3/4 meter is.  This made me think and, yes, I am guilty of this.  So I thought I would make a meter sorting game to go with this song.  Triple meter will be matched with "Silver Bells" (three syllables) and duple meter will be matched with "Gold Bells (two syllables. . . so we'll talk about how 4/4 is a form of duple meter).

Students will work in pairs and each set of pairs will have one sheet that is laminated and looks like this:

They will also have the following sheet of rhythms, cut into individual rhythm patterns.  Working with their partner, they must put all the 3/4 rhythms under the "Silver Bells" and all the 2/4 & 4/4 rhythms under the "Gold Bells".

If you are interested in this file, you can find it at my Teachers Pay Teachers store.