Jazz Band

Although April is National Jazz Month, we thought we'd get a head start on the celebrating and have a little fun with Jazz music this week.

We learned about a few instruments that are played in a Jazz band such as trumpets, trombones, saxophones, keyboards, clarinets, bass fiddles and drums.  We saw lots of pictures, and heard lots of audio samples.  We even got to touch and play a few of these instruments:

We found out that blowing a trumpet is hard work! (Don't worry, we had special mouth-piece covers so we wouldn't share germs).

Then we read Ben's Trumpet, by Rachel Isadora about a little boy who wanted to play trumpet, but didn't have one.

We marched around the room to some music by Louis Armstrong (a very famous jazz trumpeter) while playing our own "air trumpets".

And then we listened to Jazz Fly, by Matthew Golub- a story about a fly and his troubles with his jazz band.

and finally we did a little dancing to a jazzy piece: "Rag Mop", by the Ames Brothers