Lucy Locket

I just got back yesterday evening from the Colorado Music Educators Conference in Colorado Springs.  It was amazing!  The Amidons were wonderful presenters, I went to my good friend Tanya LeJeune's SMARTboard sessions and Bonnie Jacobi & some C.S.U. students gave a wonderful presentation Saturday morning.  And I presented two sessions, "Upping the Ante" and "Manipulative Mania."  It was an awesome time and I can't wait to present again!!!  (In fact, I think I'm going to put a proposal in to present "Upping the Ante" at the 2014 OAKE conference).   But, in spite of the wonderful time, it feels good to be home with my family and it feels weird not having posted on my blog in a few days!!!

Here's one I bet you know!!

The kids LOVE this song and game.  I use it in first grade for la, but often times they want to play it again in 2nd grade too!

Here's the game:

1. One student is assigned to be “Kitty Fisher” and one is assigned to be “Lucy Locket.”
2. Kitty Fisher hides purse in room.  Lucy Locket either leaves room or closes his/her eyes (you can change the name of "Lucy" and "Kitty" to boy names.
3. Lucy Locket comes back into room to find the purse.  
4. Using dynamics, the children sing the song to give Lucy clues to where the purse is hidden.  Far away = soft; Close = loud  

Here's a PowerPoint that I created to prepare and practice the rhythmic and melodic concepts.  Since I use it for la, I have it set up very similarly to my "Bounce High" and "Plainsies Clapsies" PowerPoints. 

There's a lyric slide:

A slide that compares the words to the beat:

A slide with iconic representation of the rhythm:

The rhythm written out in stick notation (the PDF also includes the notation with note heads)

A meter slide!  It's important not to forget to teach them about those lovely bar-lines!:

Melodic preparation slides for la:

Melodic prep with iconic representation of the melody with the text:

Melodic prep with iconic representation of the melody with the solfége and drawing attention to the unknown note with a "?":

Then the melodic preparation slides are duplicated on the staff.  Here are two sample slides:

There's a presentation or review slide (depending on where you are in your sequence):

And then all the preparation slides are duplicated in the practice slides, but this time the "?" is replaced with la:

The PDF also has this "stick to staff" game.  You would print out the cards (I made them black and white instead of in color. . . with my manipulatives I've gone a little crazy with my colored ink, lol!)  So, I will print these out on card stock.  I'm going to go them in different colors so that they are easier to sort.  That is, I will have a "blue" set, a "pink" set, etc. so that one group of students would get all the blue cards, one would get pink and so on.  With the little ones, cards get easily mixed up and this makes it a little easier to keep them sorted.  I will have them work in groups of 2-4, depending on the groups. (Great opportunity for differentiated grouping!).  There are 6 matches in the so-la-so-mi cards and I made some extension cards that have la in the so-mi-la-so-mi turn.  Remember, these are very different for kids to hear and it's important to teach both of these turns!

Here are the so-la-so-mi cards:

Here's a sample of a so-mi-la-so-mi card (there are 6 matches for these as well):

Now, I do have another writing activity for "Lucy Locket" and this one took me a while!  Last year I had a 1st grader give me a gift card for Teacher Appreciation Day in this cute little plastic "purse."  While the Starbucks card was awesome, I was much more intrigued with the gift card holder!  I'd been looking for them all summer and finally around Halloween I found some (below) and of course at Christmas time I "hoarded" some (hey, Safeway had them in packs of 4, it was quite the deal to buy a few sets!).  Here's the Halloween one:

Using my electronic die cut machine (we have a fancy computerized one so we can do any of the shapes that are programmed in it any size that we want to), I made a TON of 1" circles.  Then, I wrote "so," "la" and "mi" on them.  After that I laminated them (this wasn't too fun for two reasons: first of all the circles were too tiny to push into the laminater so I had to use a pencil eraser to push them back so they could be fed into the machine and secondly, that was a ton of little circles to cut out!!  I tried cutting on our machine with pre-laminated paper, trust me, I tried!! lol!)

So, when my 1st graders get to la in a couple months, working with a partner, they will get a purse that has enough so-mi-la "coins" for both of them and they will write out the phrases of "Lucy Locket":

The above PowerPoint and stick-to-staff game is on my Teachers Pay Teachers store (as a PDF file- it's really easy to transfer it over to a PowerPoint, let me know if you have any troubles with it).  The coins for the pockets, I hate to tell you, you're on your own! :)

Have a GREAT week everyone!!!