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Concert time is almost here!  Until then, check out some of our videos from previous events HERE.

Music in Our Schools Month

Hurray!  March is Music in Our Schools Month!

We have an exciting month planned in music.  Here's hoping we are finished with snow days and can get back to making music!

Our annual spring concert is just around the corner on March 31st.  This year our theme is "Richwoods Rocks!" and features a variety of pop and rock songs from yesterday and today.

Fifth graders will be rockin' their recorders as we begin our recorder unit.  We'll review most of our Recorder Karate songs from last year and add some new challenging pieces too.

Sixth, Seventh and Eighth graders will continue to work on their keyboarding skills.  We'll working on right hand techniques and add some new notes with the left hand.  In addition, we'll work with some familiar folk songs and even compose our own pieces!

Presidents Day and Our Song of the Week

Due to 16 snow days we are having class on President's Day!  Our song of the week is "Rap of the Presidents".  You can listen to it and download it here.

Rockin' through Rhythmic Dictation

Second graders ROCK!  Especially at rhythmic dictation.  Using lap packs (various staffs, graphic organizers, etc... encased in a thick page protector) and dry erase markers, students listened to rhythms using barred eighth notes, quarter notes and quarter rests and wrote down what they heard using notation.  This is not an easy skill to master, but you would never know it by watching this second grade class!

Peter and the Wolf

We have been selected as a recipient of a Target Field Trip Grant!  In February, students in 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th grades will travel to St. Louis to hear a performance by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in Powell Symphony Hall.  Then we will spend the afternoon at the St. Louis Art Museum.  So excited!

In preparation students in 1st and 2nd grades have watched Peter and the Wolf and completed several listening excercises.  In the photos below students are preparing their listening cards for an activity where they listen to a segment of Peter and the Wolf and decide what character they hear by placing that characters card on the listening map (that just happens to look like a meadow!). 

 

Teachers:  You might enjoy some of these Peter and the Wolf resources.

Lines and Spaces Up and Down

We are learning to use icons to represent musical sounds in Kindergarten.  Using large treble clef staff charts and bottle caps we practiced placing the "note heads" on spaces and on lines.  This important concept will later help us to easily distiguish pitches on the staff.  Then we made the note heads go up and down and stay the same.  The fun part was making our voices match the patterns we created!

Welcome BACK!!!

I'm so happy to be back in the classroom and LOVED starting off the year in music!  We've got some exciting things in store this semester including JumpBands, recorders, Mallet Madness and our concert "Richwoods ROCKS!" on March 28th.  In addition students in First, Second, Third and Fourth Grades are going to the symphony thanks to Target and their Field Trip Grant Program!  Hurray!!!

We started the year off with some January songs.  The links below will take you to MusicK8 Kid Tunes.  You can download these awesome songs for your home computer and put them on your MP3 player and enjoy them anytime you want.  Enjoy!

Winter Fun
Snow Day
They are the Penguins
The Soup Song
Free At Last

Random Act of Culture