Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Farm Day

It was farm day at school! The kids got to go outside and meet several farm animals today. Inside we sang farm songs, and played a pattern-mapping activity using shapes. We started by listening to "The Happy Farmer", a classical piece by Robert Schumann. We talked about the kinds of jobs that make farmers happy. We chose 3: riding a horse, driving the tractor, and milking a cow. We assigned each of these activities to a shape.



Next we pattern-mapped the song by listening to the distinct music phrasings, listening for those that repeat. We then pretended that we "drove a tractor", "rode a horse" or "milked a cow" in time with the music as we placed the shapes in order of the pattern of the song.





















Then we added instruments to the mix, and "played" the patterns we created with the colored shapes.


















Goldilocks and the bears

This Little Piggie Went to Market

Wiggly Woo

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Blogger black video issue

The black thumbnails that appear instead of individual videos are a blogger issue that has been going on for some time. Hopefully they'll get it fixed soon, but in the meantime, the videos work, they just don't look very appealing.;)

springing up

Rain is falling...

3 little kittens

Sunshine