Santa's Elf Choir

The 5th and 6th grade choir was asked to be the entertainment for the annual Old Fashioned Holiday Supper hosted by our local museum. What an honor! We felt like royalty having a photo shoot for the press release, guest visitors at our rehearsals, and free supper at the event! It was a fun way to kick off the holiday season and show off all of the amazing talent we have in our school.

The Nutcracker Museum

Each year in 2nd grade we study "The Nutcracker". I read them the story and then we listen to the eight pieces in the suite. We follow along with several listening maps and do lots of creative movement activities. We also create a Nutcracker Museum. Any student who has a nutcracker at home can bring it to school to be displayed until Christmas. This year is the most I have ever had!

Christmas Rhythms

The Kindergarteners have been working on their long (soon to be 'ta') and short-short ('ti-ti') rhythms. In groups of two, they composed patterns using trees/hats (longs) and presents/mittens (short-shorts) and then notated the rhythms below. Then they clapped the rhythm. This was their first time actually writing the long and short-short patterns instead of just reading it off of the board.

The best way to spread Christmas cheer is singing loud for all to hear!

Every December on their last day of music class before Christmas break, the 6th graders carol around the school entering as many classrooms as they can to spread a little Christmas joy! They spend several class periods preparing a carol to sing or play. In the past I had always had students sing, but this year I gave them the option of performing a Christmas song on a recorder or the barred instruments as well. Every single group did an amazing job!


This year I used the new NAfME Model Cornerstone Assessment for performing to guide their learning( Performing MCA). It was a bit lengthy and got to be a lot of paperwork, but I do think it helped the students grow and become aware of what they were doing. I think it's very important for all of the students to get used to picking and preparing a piece on their own and then performing it in front of an audience. Singing for younger kids is a great place to start. Most of the kids said they were nervous in the first couple of rooms, but by the end they were racing to get to just "one more room" before we finished.

Singing for the librarian.

Singing for the Kindergarteners

The secretarys

The lunchroom

The gym!

The instruments were too big to carry around, so they played for every person that walked through the entry!

2nd graders

Some even wore elf hats!

And if they had been to all of the rooms, they stopped people in the hallways!

Loud and Soft Assessment

The Kindergarteners have been learning about loud and soft. I used plastic plates to do my assessment this year. We listened to several pieces of music and the students held up the plate that they thought best matched the music. We listened to "March" from the Nutcracker, "Radetsky March", and "Bouree" from the Royal Fireworks.


Hint: Taking a picture or a video like these gives you an easy, quick way to assess everyone without having to rely on your memory!

Autumn Winds

The 2nd Graders created this awesome Orff arrangement in music class. All of the instrumentation and movement was created by them (with guidance, of course!).  I used a poem called "Autumn Winds" and we created instrument and movement parts to match the text. The form this class selected was:
A) Poem: Say, Play, and Move
B) Improvised instrument parts using a selected rhythm
A') Poem: Say
B) "                                                                                  "
A")Poem: Solo movement
B) "                                                                                  "
A'") Poem: Play and Move.

And of course we have one leaf that just doesn't want to fall! ;)

Surround the State in Song

The NDACDA "Surround the State in Song" honor choir took place on Oct. 8th. This is one of my favorite activities as a music teacher, because I remember my very first honor choir better than any other I attended. The first time you sing with a large group of talented, passionate people who love singing as much as you do is always amazing. This year I had the opportunity to take seven wonderful singers from my 5th and 6th grade chorus. I hope they had as much fun as I did!

Star Spangled Banner

The 4th graders did a fabulous job singing the Star Spangled Banner at the last home volleyball game. This is something I do every year after we finish our unit studying and memorizing the song. It has become a very popular tradition that the students all look forward to. Here is this year's performance.

Robot and Inventor

I had the wonderful opportunity to receive my Level I Orff training this summer at NDSU. I have been having a blast incorporating all of the wonderful things that I learned. One of my favorite activities is called "Robot and Inventor" and the purpose of it is to help students explore ways they can move their body parts, helping them gain body/kinesthetic awareness. It also helps them become comfortable creating on their own in a non-threatening environment.

Here's how it works: Partners choose one person to be the robot. The robot stands in the "off" position. When the music starts, the inventor may tap a joint on the robot and the robot must begin moving this body part to the beat. To stop the body part, the inventor must tap that part again. We started off with only one body part at a time, then slowly added more. Eventually, the robots were able to travel! The kids had a blast with this and it was really fun to watch even my most reserved students get into the activity.

Thank you!

Thanks to a grant from the Community Endowment fund, I was able to purchase a new Yamaha Clavinova for my classroom this year! I love having the ability to transpose, record, and add background music to my playing. Plus, it's much easier to move around my room than my giant piano was. Now to figure out what the rest of the buttons do!

Music in Film and Garage Band Stories

Last year I used Garage Band in my classroom for the first time and had students compose their own music to accompany a story that they had written. Here is the post about that project: Musique Concrete


This year I varied the project slightly. Instead of studying Musique Concrete, we studied Music In Film. I found a bunch of great lesson ideas online and kind of combined them to make one big project. We started by learning that there are 4 main uses of music in movies: to set the time and place, to convey/describe characters and ideas, to create a mood or atmosphere, or to express emotions. We also learned about Mickey-Mousing (creating sound effects). Then we talked about the different elements of music (instrumentation, timbre, rhythm, etc.) and how we can vary them to create different ideas. We watched several YouTube clips to show the importance of music and how it can demonstrate the 5 main uses listed above. After we were comfortable with all of these elements, we used Garage Band to record a story and then create music to accompany it. The stories we used were all short children's books. I was completely blown away with some of the finished projects. The students went above and beyond even what I could do. Here is the assignment they were given to fill out and I've also attached one of the completed stories.

Check this out!!   The Pied Piper





Rhythm Practice

Here are two games I use to help my K-2nd graders practice rhythms. In Kindergarten we used giant beat strips and then notated ta and ti-ti rhythms with our shoes! This really helped us visualize the different number of sounds on each beat. I'll use this with my older students as well because they never seem to remember how many beats each note gets!

I also like to use caterpillar rhythms. I have a bunch of circles with different rhythms notated on them. I often have them work with a partner to create a 4 beat rhythm and then combine with another group to create an 8-beat rhythm. Sometimes we put 4 groups together to create 16 beats. When we use half notes, we put the circle next to it upside down so that we see it takes up two circles.

Mr. Stretchy

I recently purchased a stretchy band for my classroom and my students are in love with "Mr. Stretchy"! It has been great for my lower grades and especially for my adaptive music class. Here are some pictures of us doing a routine to "March" from Artie Almeida's book, Parachutes, Ribbons, and Scarves, Oh My!.

Solfeg Games

Here are two games I use for practicing our solfeg patterns for So-Mi and So-Mi-Do.


The S-M game uses a pack of ice cream bulletin board cut outs I bought from Amazon. On the ice cream I drew three lines and then drew different S-M patterns on them. They had to match them to the cone that had the matching pattern.

The So-Mi-Do game was very similar, only I used a picture of a fly that I found and I wrote different SMD patterns on those. Then I made copies of my SMD flashcards, shrunk them, and printed them off on colored paper. Working with a partner, the students had to flip over a flashcard and swat the fly that matched the flashcard with a fly swatter. This was a lot of fun!

Music Inspires!

The theme for Music In Our Schools Month (MIOSM) this year was "Music Inspires". So how do we inspire our students? I feel like this is a constant question in the education world! I'm not sure that I really came up with the answer, but here's what I did to get my students more excited about music.


1) The first week I had all of my students color a MIOSM pennant created by the wonderful Mrs. Tracy King that I downloaded from Teacherspayteachers. I strung them all together and hung them in the hallway by my classroom. I'm on the same floor as the 3rd-6th graders so we don't get as many art projects decorating our hallway as the lower elementary, so it was nice to see a little extra color on the walls.

2) The 2nd week I gave all of the teachers a Staff Survey that I also downloaded from TPT. It surveyed the teachers on their musical interests and backgrounds. I wanted to inspire the students to get involved in music, even if they don't want to grow up to be a music teacher. I hung the surveys all over the school with the name of the teacher covered up so they had to guess. Would you believe that our 6th grade teacher was once in a punk rock band in California?! Or that our 4th grade teacher has been in 14 musicals?!


3) Every month this year I have featured a Composer of the Month on my main bulletin board. My March composer was John Williams, because I figured he was probably the most inspiring composer ever in the eyes of a student. Kids were constantly asking me if we could listen to more of his music! One of the activities we did was a Musical Masterpiece project. Each of the students started out with a piece of paper and were told to draw a picture to represent the John Williams piece that we were listening to.  (Ex: If we were listening to "Jaws" they could draw a shark). After listening for a few minutes, everyone rotated to the left and began coloring on their neighbor's picture while we listened to a new piece (Ex: "Harry Potter"). We continued to do this for "Jurassic Park", "E.T." and "Star Wars". By the end, the picture would be made up of 5 different scenes drawn by 5 different people. It was really fun!

Giant class rotation.

John Williams Continued: I went to the Dollar Store for milk and came home with 12 pool noodles that I made into 24 light sabers (again, idea courtesy of Tracy King!). We used these on the last week of the month to keep the steady beat in the form of a light  saber battle while listening to "Imperial March". I think you could say the kids enjoyed it!

4) Each week I had a Music Trivia question with MIOSM stickers and pencils I ordered from NAfME.org as prizes. I ordered 150 pencils and ran out because I had so many kids get the answers! Here are the questions I used:

Week 1: What was the first song performed in outer space? (Happy Birthday)

Week 2: What instrument was once known as a sackbut? (Trombone)

Week 3: How many keys are there on a piano? (88)

Week 4: In which key do most toilets flush? (Eb Major)







5) I re-created the logo for this year's theme on the wall outside of my room and placed inspirational music quotes on the leaves. We had Parent-Teacher conferences at the end of the month, so I'm hoping that my numerous decorations around the building caught their attention and provided a little music advocacy!