Sweet Melodies

In October, our focus topic was Melody. 

Kindergarten and 1st grade worked on high and low sounds

2nd and 3rd grade worked on how pitches move (step, skip, repeat)

4th and 5th grade worked on reading the notes on the staff.

Bulletin Board:

 Floor Staff made out of tape! This is great for visual and kinetic learners. Lower grades practice moving up and down. They also practice their step, skips and repeats. The Upper grades practice their note names. Sometimes we use stuffed animals or bean bags, and sometimes we use ours bodies!

I stole this idea from The Sweetest Melody! I would call out a letter and they had to place their erasers on the correct spot. The kids loved playing this in an Around The World style taking on each other two by two.

Not really melody, but I made a new sign for my door to reinforce staff lines and bar lines.

Focus on Rhythm - Part 2

There are so many fun ideas on Pinterest! We did not have time to do them all. It would be very easy to spend months and months just on the topic of Rhythm. I am hoping that we spent this one month really learning the basics of rhythm. From there, it should be able to build on that understanding.

Two games that I did not get pictures of:
1) Rhythm Hangman (hangman with only rhythm related words. Super easy and lots of fun!)
2) This is a What?! (previously mentioned on my blog here. This time we just used rhythm related flashcards)

Here are some of the games and worksheets we did!

A color by note that I made myself. I stole the idea from Tracy King's TpT 

Rhythm SPLAT! is an idea I found on Pinterest, but could never find the original post. I didn't remember to go buy fly swatters, so we just used mallets. [please know that this is a posed picture and that my students are not so horrible at hearing rhythms that they each pick a different one!]

I have seen ton of ideas of correlating fractions with rhythm. This is my example of a rhythm pizza. We also did a group activity of separating pizza words into their rhythms stolen from Elementary Music Methods.

 Eighth Note pizza

Whole Note pizza

This is a color by rest worksheet that I've had for so long that I can't remember where I got it from. I like it because it doesn't have pictures in the color key. It just says "Whole Rest = Yellow". So it is a quick and easy assessment with my upper grades to see if they know their rests!