Swat that Fly! Recorders and more!

We are in the final stretches of the school year!  Which is one reason why I missed Transition Tuesday this past week.  I'm so sorry about that!  It was "Try to Catch Up Tuesday" for me!  We have 19 days with kids 5 classes with field trips, a choir/handbell/recorder concert and two Kindergarten Spring Sings (we have 6 rounds of kindergarten!!!  I'm dreading next year when I see them on a 5 day rotation, that's music 1 time a week!)

My 4th and 5th graders are doing recorders right now.  I'm making a "Recorder is AWESOME!" file, which has been a lot of fun but has so many parts that I'm not ready to post it to TpT yet.  I'll share it soon, and like "LEGO"s, it's going to have sets because I don't think it will all fit in one file!  I have some Tic Tac Toe games that I've made for them too for the Recorder as well as a "I Have/Who Has?" Recorder version, in which they play their patterns. . . again these will be posted in a little while.

This week we played a new game "Swat that Fly!" and it ended up having it's own little metamorphosis as we played.  

To start, last year my mom bought me these GIANT fly swatters from the Dollar Tree:

They are HUGE and the kids think they're super funny.  The Dollar Tree still has them, you'll find them by the brooms and mops!

There were a few ways we played this, first we warmed up and sang (in solfége and letter names) and play through the flashcards I made:

One of my 4th graders came up with the idea to put recorders in the fly's mouth. :)  (one of the perks of coming early to handbells when the music teacher is working on lesson stuff!)

Then we spread the cards out all over the room.  The kiddos were in four teams, with each team parallel to one of my four walls.  So, we had teams "East," "West," "North" and "South".

To start, I sang a pattern on absolute pitch names and one student went out to "swat" the fly that had that pattern.

 It didn't end there, in order for their team to "earn" that card the remaining students had to successfully play the pattern.

Like I said, the game had it's own "metamorphosis."  The students who were seated started working on the fingerings of the pattern while their team mate looked for the fly pattern with that pattern.  It was awesome peer teaching.  They were correcting each other's hand position, reminding each other to articulate, I couldn't have been happier.

After we had gone through everyone on each team having a turn to hunt for flies we changed the game.  Instead of me singing the pattern on letter names, I played the pattern on the piano.  It really challenged them to hear the intervals and they did awesome with it!

So far I have a BAG and a BAGE file created for these with the BAGED version almost complete.

We also played this with my younger kiddos with a rhythm version of it.  I usually get requests when I make these games so I went ahead and made files for all the rhythmic and melodic elements, if you see something that's missing let me know and I'll make it for you!  My links are for the bundles, which are the most cost effective but you'll also see at my TpT store that there are individual files too! :)

Here's hoping you're week is a "hit"!  I promise I'll see you later this week on Transition Tuesday!