Fiddle Jam Online

On Facebook I found a link to a series of lessons on fiddling, and the first lesson on Bile 'Em Cabbage Down is free. You can find it here. Like Orff, it uses a simple song and then adds variation upon variation with some room for improvisation and creation. Like Fiddle Camp, it teaches the song by ear. Well, that's like Suzuki, too. It also throws in some chord theory.

I have my first summer private students today, and I plan to use this lesson with everyone for whatever level they are playing.

Catching Up and Fiddle Camp

I have been remiss in posting. I have not been remiss in making music integral to my life. The end of the school year brought the usual concerts - the fruition of our work. Vista Orchestra and Recorders performed, the EIMP of CUSD performed, and my private studio students were in a recital. The Women's Choir at church sang in the big music service.

However, right now on the forefront of my mind is the amazing, transformative week I spent at Sierra Fiddle Camp. My mind is swimming with tunes. Scottish tunes, Swedish tunes, Old Time USA tunes, and a few from other places.  Tunes on my fiddle, tunes in my voice.

I learned how to learn tunes by ear on the fiddle. This is big for me. I know that it has created new synapses in my brain, and I think I may spend a good deal of time on our upcoming sabbatical in working on fiddling. I wondered how I would continue learning by ear. In camp it's set out for you. The teacher plays a tune in full, then breaks it down into chunks and we repeat small chunks and add them to others until we have a whole A or B section, then we end up knowing the whole tune.

(Interesting fact. Although I felt as though I knew the tunes really, really well, when I played them by myself at home, I needed to relisten to the recordings I made to clear up some fuzzy places. It's very helpful to be playing in a group (which is one reason I love teaching string classes).)

So, someone suggested that I make my own recordings of tunes to learn. I can play the small chunks for the looping. I will have to try that. I also have some recordings from Peter Cooper's book with work on ornamentation, so that will come with me on sabbatical.

Boomwhacker Scale

I am posting this photo in my blog so that I can pin it to my Music Teaching Ideas board on Pinterest. A music teacher on the AOSA Facebook page posted it after her 4th grade students had come up with this idea themselves. Since I have boomwhackers as well as a music staff on my rug, I might just do this with my students, too!

My Many Colored Days

One can buy a pre-packaged lesson for Dr. Seuss's My Many Colored Days. I already have a supply of scarves, and I got the book from the public library, but I didn't have the CD with pre-selected music. No problem, I decided to put together my own playlist.

Here is the lesson plan. Read the book, which assigns an emotion to a color, to the class. Then put a collection of scarves in the middle of the circle and have students select one color of scarf. Read each page and have the students with that color scarf move with appropriate motions to match the mood of the book/music. At the end, choose one kind of wild piece for everyone. This is the free-for-all dance piece.

Here is my playlist:

Red - Hoedown from Copland's Rodeo

Blue - Aviary from Saint-Saens' Carnival of the Animals

Brown - Elephant from Saint-Saens' Carnival of the Animals

Yellow - Flight of the Bumblebee by Rimsky-Korsakov

Gray - First movement from Quartet for the End of Time by Messian

Orange - Circus Music from Copland's Red Pony Suite

Green - Aquarium from Saint-Saens' Carnival of the Animals

Purple - Gymnopodie #1 by Eric Satie

Pink - Run! Run! from Memories of Childhood by Octavio Pinto

Black - The Comedians Pantomime by Kabalevsky

All Colors - Sing Sing Sing by Benny Goodman

What might you choose for the colors?

Saint-Saens' Aquarium

Here are my first graders moving to Aquarium from the Carnival of the Animals. I hand out a scarf to every-other student (to the exclamations of "You forgot me!), but then I come around to those poor scarfless waifs and give them one finger cymbal. We have already moved to the music with the Move It! video, so the music is in their ears. The children with scarves are to move as the seaweed, and the children with a finger cymbal "swim" through the seaweed. When one fish meets another, they gently touch cymbals for a delightful sound. After one time through, they swim back to their regular spot and exchange with the person next to them so they have turns being both the seaweed and fish. This is always a favorite activity.

March is Hard

I keep thinking that I should write a note to myself that I pull out at the beginning of March. I need to remember how difficult this month can be. I always know that it's a long month, especially after February's 28 (or 29) days. February has 2 Monday holidays in the CUSD calendar. March has no break (although I often take off some days for myself in this month).

But I forget that it is really hard for kids. It must be, because attendance in strings classes diminishes. Things start to get harder, and the May concert is a long way off. April spring break is a long way off.  Kids drop out of strings class (especially beginning students) because the music gets harder and we start moving faster.

My patience wears thin with students who are not paying attention or showing up regularly. Today while we were passing out music I had a student leave class to go to the bathroom and come back and look perplexed when he didn't have the music.

Personally, I need a spring break in March. Perhaps the kids do, too.

If I Had a Hammer

The recent death of Pete Seeger has brought this childhood hero of mine to the forefront of my thoughts lately. I decided that the kids at Vista need to sing If I Had a Hammer again, and I have pulled out my guitar and started introducing it to the kids. Of course, they immediately take to the song.

I'm surprised (but maybe not so much) that some of the teachers do not even know who Pete Seeger was. But today, in the teacher's room during lunch, I started talking about the song, and the teachers who know the song started singing it, clapping along, with great gusto. The office manager and one of the teachers just looked on, watching us. There was even mention that teachers need to sing this in the talent show in June. For sure, we are going to sing this as a whole school in the next month or so.

This reminds me of the time that I had to introduce Puff, the Magic Dragon to the students. It's probably time I dusted that one off, too.