Week at a Glance

Hey Cougars! The past two weeks have FLOWN by with the kickoff of Percussion Ensemble, Cougar Choir, and all the excitement that happens in our regular classes! Here's a rundown of what's been happening in the classroom lately...

5th Grade has been preparing to travel back in time about 500 years to the Medieval Era for our upcoming musical - JOUST! Last week students had the chance to audition for speaking roles such as Merlin, Damsels, Court Jesters, and many more! Lyric packets went out this week to begin memorizing words at home. Stay tuned for what kind of transformation the stage will undergo in a few weeks...

 

Fourth grade learned about their opportunity to join this year's Cougar Choir, met George Friderick Handel and his "Hornpipe from Water Music", and enjoyed an African passing game called Obwesana. For it to be such a catchy and fun melody, you'd never think it means "The rock has crushed my hand, Grandma"! Crushed hands or not, its plenty of fun.  

Third grade happened to luck out with the most pictures, so lucky them! We started off reviewing songs with Do, Re, Mi, and Sol using what we know about pitch relationships to label iconic notation. Once we could sing it on solfege (that's the Do, Re, Mi business) with our hand signs, we transferred that knowledge to standard notation and figured it out on little xylophones. The little rainbow ones really come in handy when everyone is practicing the same melody. Once its solid, we can transfer to the full Orff keyboards. Later, we reviewed rhythmic values with a rhythm dice game. Quarter notes, Half notes, Whole notes, and their coordinating rests. The students had a fantastic time making their dice with their partner and seeing whose score came out higher at the end!

Second grade has been preparing for their field trip in February to the Dallas Symphony with a review of instrument families. We've really dug into the string family with some video performances, seeing how a bow is made, and even getting to experience a bow and rosin up close. Its pretty astounding to find out that the strings on a bow are actually horse hair! (I apologize for the lack of photo - I could have sworn that I snapped one during one of our small group activities.)

First grade started training their ears back in Kindergarten to recognize melodic direction, but now its time to label it. We've learned that high and low notes are actually called Sol and Mi, notes can live on lines or spaces, and there are three ways a melody can move: up, down, or repeat. 

Once we mastered Sol and Mi, we moved on to battle some aliens and blast them with asteroids with Galactic Goonies! Gotta be quick because we only have 10 seconds to identify the melodic direction before the aliens slime our astronaut with their Galactic Goo Guns. Eww!

 Find out this weekend what the final cast list is for the 5th grade JOUST! production...