Happy 2016 St. Matthews families! Our focus this past month has been songs about winter, melodic direction and composing. We sang Hooray For God and performed at school church Sunday. Hooray For God is a St. Matthews original put together by yours truly. The children loved singing it in class along with the guitar. Our winter songs include Chubby Little Snowman, a rhyme with percussion instrument parts, 5 Little Snowmen, She’ll be Comin Around the Mountain, Penguin Penguin which has a xylophone part, and the Penguin Polka. The Penguin Polka demonstrates a 2/4 time signature and we had fun playing the triangle and also dancing to the song!
The 2’s and 3’s classes explored melodic direction with singing, moving and playing the xylophone to Frederick Fountain. The 4’s 5’s Kindergarten and Kindergarten enrichment classes did the same with Snowman Joe and also played the boomwhackers! We learned that the biggest boomwhacker has the lowest sound and the smallest boomwhacker has the highest sound. The older classes also sang Hibernation and Ice and Snow. The Kindergarten learned the song Dry Bones and moved to Toe Leg Knee which reminds us of the do re mi’s we echo sing sometimes! We also learned The Penguin Blues, a really funny song with a cool blues sound! The Kindergarten enrichment classes learned Kookaburra and Funga Alafia as we are exploring songs about countries and cultures around the world.
We are starting to learn about composers and composing as well. Notice our rhythm compositions hanging on the bulletin board outside the music classroom. Mr. Bach is the first composer we will learn about and continue into February.