First of all, Happy Sunday and thank you to everyone who stocked up this weekend with the Teachers Pay Teachers Facebook sale! What a day! I know I bought lots of new products and I can't wait to use them, I hope you're as excited as I am!
Aileen over at Mrs. Miracle's Music Room is having a linky party and I'm hoping to get a blog together about my 5 favorite pins for the month, but it might not be this week. Hubby has P/T conferences tomorrow, I have them on Tuesday & Thursday and Wednesday night is marching band regionals. I don't know if I've ever mentioned this on my blog but my mom is a music teacher. In fact, we did our Kodály levels together at Portland State! But my baby-brother is also a music teacher. He's teamed with the dark side- you know, secondary. Just kidding! He's an amazing high school band teacher and last year his band really showed all the progress that he's made in the time that he's been there. Just like so many of us, with him, it's about the process, skill development and love of music that is his focus instead of the end product. We all know, that when we put our priorities into teaching the students the fundamentals and laying a good foundation the product will come. So, last year his marching band took state and his drum line went onto win Winter Drum line. In one year the marching band equaled the number of state championship banners in the gym as the entire history of the school's athletic program. I'm particularly proud. One, because he's my brother. Two, he teaches at the high school that we both attended! :)
So, long story short, head on over to Aileen's blog and I'll get a link up there soon!
A few other things I've been working on are revamping my Turkey Rhythm files that I blogged about last year. I'm transferring those so that everyone can access them and they will be very reasonably priced at my TpT store. I'm also working on a "Free Bird" game, nothing like piggy backing off the upcoming movie, huh? And some Turkey Tune files as well as a songs for Thanksgiving file.
One file that I just finished, and you can buy on sale now, is the Thanksgiving Dinner Beat Strips. If you have my regular beat strip file, this is an add on to that. But if you don't have it, everything you need is included!
First, there are beat cards. You pick which meter (or there are cards with no meter) your kiddos will work with and the number of beats:
Then the rhythm cards come in four versions.
- Picture only of the dinner item
- Picture and name of the dinner item
- Picture, rhythm & name of the dinner item
- Picture & rhythm of the dinner item.
A couple of these last for two beats. Here's the main reason why: who can pass up cranberry sauce of a basket of buns at the Thanksgiving dinner table?!
Kiddos can use these for diction (teacher says or claps a pattern and they write it out), notation (students write a pattern that maybe matches a song that they know) and composition (students compose their own pattern).
The composition cards are used very similarly to the beat strips but alleviate the beat strip portion. These can also be used for notation, dictation and composition. They can also make a nice transfer or connection to the Orff process of speech to playing instruments. Students can create patterns that can become ostinatos or partner patterns to play with known songs.
The composition cards come in big and little options. These work well in centers too!
Friday was my student teacher's last day. It's going to be so odd to not have her in the classroom. Those of you that have had student teachers know that when it goes really well it become team teaching and that's what this situation was like. It was so fun having a colleague in the room. She brought some amazing ideas! I'm planning on blogging about some of the fun things that she did!
Have a GREAT week everyone!
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