Canoe Song

Some of you are "lucky" and are still on winter break. . ..  I'm not one of those "lucky" ones.  But, it's all in the eye of the beholder, isn't it?!  It was a really fun first day back.  The kiddos were really excited to share about their break and ready to get back into the swing of things.

Speaking of getting back into the swing of things, we brought this favorite back in 4th grade today.  We used it in 3rd grade for low la but are bringing it back now to prepare syn-co-pa (feels like I've been prepping this forever. . . . .).

Here's the song:

This is a fun boomwacker part that we added with it in 3rd grade: 

And here's a really EASY Orff accompaniment that my 3rd graders this year did for our Parent Engagement Night:

As I mentioned, we're prepping syn-co-pa so here's a new PowerPoint that I made:

First, we have lyric slides:

Then there are some low la  prep slides that I included for next year's 3rd grade:

After preparation comes practice, so here are a couple of the practice slides we'll use for review with 4th grade as a warm-up when prepping syn-co-pa:

Here are the rhythm preparation slides:

 And here are the practice slides:

After syn-co-pa is presented we'll sing it on solfége, using the stick rhythm and maybe even play "Remote Control" with it:

And we'll practice reading the solfa on the staff, with the rhythm.  Again, we might use an inner hearing game for this:

I mentioned in an earlier post that I know I need to do a better job practicing reading Absolute Pitch Names, so here are those slides:

Once we've read syn-co-pa in numerous songs we'll finally get to these cards.  I made them for the Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer game but never got to them.  Things happen and the kids we're prepared enough, so we "rolled with the punches" and had to change our pacing:

I'm presenting at CMEA (Colorado Music Educators Conference) at the end of the month: one session called "Upping the Ante" and another one called "Manipulative Mania".  This is for the "Manipulative Mania" session, sponsored by ROCKE (so, all you Colorado folks, you can buy this at CMEA this year!).  I LOVE the way this turned out and we'll be using this as an assessment in a  few weeks.  Here's the beat board, the oars act as barlines:

The students will have four canoes and they must put them in the correct order to match the song:

Using the back side of the canoe, they can compose their own 4-beat rhythms on each canoe using a vis-a-vis marker.

The boards can also be used with other die cutes such as fish, boats, seashells.  Here's a couple fish thrown on:

 If you would like a copy of the PowerPoint above, it's available at my Teacher Pay Teachers store and includes the non-holiday song sorting game from the Rudolph file.

I hope you all have a GREAT weekend!!