First Grade Practice

Here are sound clips or recordings of classes working on the program music that your students can practice with! As I get more recordings completed for all of the songs, I will make sure to have them added!

I'm Hungry!



We Are Dancing



In the Woods

Long Legged Sailor



Grizzly Bear



Old King Glory



Bate Bate Chocolate



Bobby Shafto



Pease Porridge

Composer of the Month: Billie Holiday

For the month of February, students in Second Grade studied the composer Billie Holiday. Billie Holiday was one of the very first black female composers of the Jazz genre, and became extremely famous for her ability to improvise. While Holiday grew up in a very difficult environment, bouncing from place to place until finally landing in a home with her aunt's mother-in-law, she was able to find solace in her musical ability and began singing public performances at the age of 14. She made her first record deal at the age of 18 and went on to become one of the most famous jazz singers of all time.

As part of our project studying Billie Holiday, students had were asked to complete three worksheets this month. For the first one, they were presented with a song by Billie Holiday and asked to draw a picture of what the song made them think of. For the second worksheet of the project, students were asked to complete a scavenger hunt, looking around the room at information posted about Holiday and writing the information they discovered about her. For the final worksheet, they were again asked to listen to music by Holiday and this time write a paragraph (using complete sentences) of what the song made them think of and WHY it made them think of this.

Here are some completed projects!

Sing Me Another!

Second Grade has begun working on a new rhythm, that we call Du-Da-Di. This rhythm can be felt in songs where eighth notes are grouped in threes instead of twos with Du-De from our previously learned rhythms. Here, you can hear a second grade group singing a song we have recently learned that uses this rhythm. Aren't their voices beautiful!?

Green Grass Grew All Around and more!

First Grade is getting ready for their upcoming concert during Music in our Schools Month on March 22! While learning the songs is important, so is having fun while we do it. To learn our songs for our program, we are playing games that extend the concepts of our songs, while also allowing us to have fun doing it!

Here we are playing "We Are Dancing," one of our songs for the program!

Here we are singing "Green Grass Grew All Around," a cyclical song that could never end! It's extremely silly AND long, but the kids are doing a great job learning all the words!

Rhythm Writing

Over the past 4 months, students in second grade have been working on learning to speak and read rhythms! We have been learning our rhythms in the same way you learn to speak your native language; by hearing and speaking them first, then reading them (learning the symbols for them), and then once you can successfully read them, we learn to write them. All of our second grade students can successfully speak, read, and now write the rhythms for quarter notes (du), eighth notes (du-de), and quarter rests (sh!).

Here we can see groups of second graders writing rote (which means copying) rhythms on their first time writing! We are practicing writing our rhythm notation. Typically, students have issues with this because they write them as lollipops, where they color in the circle and then draw a line in the middle. We are working on not doing this, instead writing the letter d or p and coloring in the circle for our notes. These kiddos are extremely successful at this as you can see!

Here we have students working on worksheets to create their own rhythmic patterns. Mastery of a subject means they can successfully and correctly create (or improvise) their own, and then speak or play it on an instrument correctly. Our second graders have successfully gained mastery over these rhythms, and we are starting to move on to new rhythms now!

Second Grade: Four White Horses

For the past couple of weeks, Second Grade has been working on a hand-clapping song game from the Caribbean. It is interpreted as a song about four white horses travelling on a river in a boat or barge. The weather looks as though it is going to rain the next day, and so they are advised to come back up the river where it's safe.

The song itself sounds like non-sense, and the kids have a blast determining why the lyrics are in the order they are in. They love the seemingly random inclusion of the ripe banana within the song. Within this song, our students are working on steady beat, choreography, and syncopation (saying words off the beat), and they are getting better and better at it.

Here is a video of four awesome students from Mrs. Lott's class working on the hand clapping game; their concentration is awesome!

Here is a recording of Mrs. Collins and Mrs. Thomas's class singing the song. I love how enthusiastic they get when singing the song, and the little giggles at the end show how much fun they are truly having!


I hope you enjoyed the glimpse in our classroom! Keep checking back to see what else is going on in the BCPS music room!

Kindergarten Program Practice!

Kiddos can use this PowerPoint with the music embedded to practice the words along with the music while at home!