NEED TO KNOW
Red Balloons #7: Can you believe we are halfway through the semester?! Everyone is doing such a great job identifying the lines and spaces of the staff, audiating, finding do, and all sorts of great musical skills!
GREAT WORK!: Your students are so much fun to have in class, and I can tell they have supportive parents. Thanks for sharing your amazing kids!
LINES AND SPACES: We have been talking a LOT about the lines and spaces on the staff. Your students understand about line notes, space notes, and how to verbally tell (with numbers) which line or space the notes are on. They are doing so great!
GOOD TO KNOW
OOOO HALLOWEEN: Singing like a ghost is a great channeling exercise, used in vocal singing lessons and choir warmups. We can practice a pure, natural head tone while extending the child's vocal range and helping them experiment with the sounds their voices can make. Here is a great blogpost about it, including a Haloween coloring page!
MAGIC LAMP PUPPET SHOW: The puppet shows help students to hear and identify the classical music, which helps the music to come alive! We have one more week of Magic Lamp, and then we'll introduce a BRAND NEW PUPPET SHOW on week 9! So exciting!
FUN TO KNOW
In most music for western ears and in Let's Play Music, we use the diatonic "major scale," which is a combination of 8 notes going from DO to DO with a specific pattern of whole and half steps. Other world music traditions have other scales with other patterns. But nearly every music system incorporates a pattern based on the same five notes, called the pentatonic scale. Some scientists say these notes are "hardwired" or "pre-installed" in our human brains. In this video, Bobby McFerrin uses the pentatonic scale to "play" an audience and shows how our brains are musically wired. It's amazing! You can find the pentatonic scale in a few ways. It uses the do-re-mi-sol-la of our major scale, and you can pull those notes out from your bell sets and experiment. On a keyboard, the easiest pentatonic scale includes all the black keys and only the black keys. In our classes, Hickety Pickety Bumblebee and Scotland's Burning both use notes from the pentatonic scale. So do Amazing Grace, Swing Low Sweet Chariot, My Girl, Old McDonald, and so many others! It really is a natural scale for your brain to love! For a lot more information on the diatonic "Major scale" and the pentatonic scale, along with other scales used in western music and around the world, check out this amazing blogpost!
