Music

The Kinders are combined with the 1st Graders to make an exciting class of musicians and dancers.  They are called The Pancakes!

We continue to practice beat and rhythm using iconic notation and body percussion.  We have started to explore stick notation and are discussing dynamics, (loud and soft) and tempo (fast and slow), while still creating our own movements to known songs. We sang Peace Canon, Shalom Chaverim, and many other favorites in the beginning of Winter.  We have worked on sol, mi & la songs, such as Rain, Rain, and songs to practice ta & titi, like Blue Bird.  We have had fun with percussion centers, where students played rhythm sticks, wood blocks, triangles, tambourines and xylophones and danced with scarves to poems or stories like The Sea Turtle. 

We  play many un-pitched instruments to keep a steady beat and/or rhythm and then explore rhythms on pitched instruments.  We also practice sol mi la using songs such as, A Tisket, A Tasket and explored Do, Re, & Mi, using the song Peace Canon. 

One of our favorite Mexican folk dances is El Chocolate and we started learning a folk dance from Eastern Europe (and using Russian words), called Sasha!