Summer!!!

Only a couple of days left until the Canada Day Assembly and then........SUMMER!! Yay! Time to rest, play and get excited for a whole new year at school! There is a lot to do in the summer outside and inside. Make sure if its a rainy day you check out the music blog to try out some of our fun music websites to play games or create music at lmmusicnotes.blogspot.com . Also when you are outside playing with your brothers, sisters, cousins, and friends I have a cool website to check out with clapping games. I thought this was this was an interesting thing to know about clapping games! A researcher in Israel conducted the first study of hand-clapping songs. "We found that children in the first, second and third grades who sing these songs demonstrate skills absent in children who don't take part in similar activities. We also found that children who spontaneously perform hand-clapping songs in the yard during recess have neater handwriting, write better and make fewer spelling errors." Yeahhhh! even more reason so learn and play these clapping games and clapping songs! Go ahead give Miss Mary Mack or any other hand clapping game a try! http://funclapping.com/International.php

Boomwacker Composition

The Grade 5's enjoyed working together in groups to come up with some amazing boomwacker compositions! I was impressed by the complex rhythms and the way they were respectful of everyones ideas. Here is one example of the work they did. Compositions are a great way to use everything we have learned together in our music classroom. I have really enjoyed teaching you guys!!

Canada Day

Only 15 days to go and we are still working hard! The choir is practicing to get ready for our annual Canada Day Assembly on the last day of school. We will be singing "I Believe" the song you will have probably heard when we had the Olympics here in Canada. It was originally sung by Nikki Yanofsky. In case anyone else would like to sing along with us that day, here is a video for you to sing along to! The words repeat alot so its pretty easy to catch on. We will hopefully have the lyrics up on the screen for everyone as well. Thanks to all my committed choir students!!! I know the weather is nice and I really appreciate you sticking with it! Here we goooo!!!! So excited for the Olympics!

Alphabet Action Songs

For the past few month the Kindergarten students have been learning a song for every letter of the alphabet. The program is called Alphabet Action Songs. For each letter, a phonics song AND an action song were learned. The kids loved them so much and even started to use them in their writers workshop strategies for sounding out words. Research has demonstrated that the use of music and movement will really help the students to learn the letters and the sounds that the letter makes. The songs are so much fun that the students didn't even realize how much they were learning!