Swim Ring Sanity-Saver

It is almost summer, and you can feel it in the air. Not the outside air, since the weather is crazy (It snowed yesterday! No joke!) but the air in the school is thick with kids-gone-cray-cray. Between assemblies, field-trips, indoor field day, and graduations I’ll see less than half my classes this week. Those I do see will be out of their minds with anticipation for summer. Plus, we’ve had indoor recess every day for the past two weeks. What the heck do you do with kids this time of year?

Two words, my friends: swim rings.

Yup. You heard me. No, I’m not telling you to take a personal day and go to a beach. Stop buying that plane ticket to the Caribbean, because can use swim rings as drums. Let that sink in for a bit, folks.

I picked up these swim rings at the Dollar Tree. (Have I mentioned that I love that place? Oh wait, I wrote a whole post about it.) The same ones at Walmart were $3.88, so it’s a good deal. Tire swim rings = coolest thing ever to a 4^th grade boy. I have small yellow rings and big blue rings as well. We use one mallet (you could use two if you have enough) to play the ring, and one hand to steady the ring so it doesn’t go flying.

These rings are a great instrument for pretty much any drum activity, with an added bonus of being interesting and new. I like having three colors, because it makes drum circle pieces a cinch.

Since it’s the end of the year and I don’t have a lot of time to prefect a complicated drum ensemble piece, I decided to keep it simple and play poetry on our swim rings.

For primary kiddos, we read Commotion in the Ocean by Giles Andreae. Get it from Amazon here. We read all the poems, students chose their favorite, and then we wrote out the rhythm. Most of them are simple enough that quarter/eighth notes work fine. Once we had the rhythm down, we went to swim rings and played the poem.

My 5^th graders are losing their minds. They are a tough group anyway, but with two days left they’ve gone bonkers. (The weather doesn’t help... Snow. In. May. What?!) 4^th and 3^rd graders aren’t much better in the sanity department. So to combat the insanity, we read Alligator Pie by Dennis Lee. Get it from Amazon here. Once we had the poem down, students created an ostinato to go with. Students then transferred to swim rings, and a few students on the smaller rings performed the ostinato. It was fun to experiment and see what they came up with. One class was obsessed with saying “BOOM!” when they got something right, so we made that our ostinato. Another class opted to do a three-part round, so we had the tires go first, followed by the blues, followed by the yellows.

These swim rings are definitely going into my tool box as an end-of-the-year lifesaver. 

Treble Clef Story Project

Ah, the treble clef. It is an absolutely essential skill to learn, but students tend to struggle with it simple because it takes so much repetition to learn. There’s only so many times you can run through flash cards before you start getting bored. (Let’s be clear here, I get bored faster than the kids do!) 

The good news is, there are lots of resources to make learning the treble clef fun. I used this project to wrap up a treble clef unit for 3^rd grade, though you could easily use it for another grade as well.

To learn the treble clef, we used a lot of technology. Staff Wars is a staple in my classroom when learning notes, and the students love it. Star Wars + blowing stuff up = great opportunity for learning! No, really. The kids love it! We also created our own silly mnemonic device sentences to help remember the notes. My favorite example this year from that activity was, “Evil Goblins Buy Dirty Food”.

Once individual note identification became comfortable, students had daily puzzle challenges using Treble Clef Words at classics for kids and eventually the more advanced Word Warrior games. These games had students spell out a word using notes on the treble clef staff. Word Warrior also lets you blow stuff up, which is a proven recipe for success.

For the project, students created a short story (5-10 sentences) that contained at least 5 treble clef words. For the final product, students wrote the words on the treble clef within their story. Students brainstormed a list of several words that only use the musical alphabet, A-G. We then organized them into small, medium, and long words. Students could self-differentiate based on how comfortable they were. 

We started with a frame of what the story would be, using the frame: (Character) is (Doing Something) (Somewhere). I gave them a starter list with super-heroes making breakfast or fighting evil in an airport or a farm, but students were free to use anything that was school appropriate.

Here is an example of a rough draft. The story frame is at the top.

Next, students looked at the musical alphabet words and chose 5 that would be easy to fit in their story. For instance, if your story frame was “Spongebob making breakfast under the sea,” it would make sense to use the word “egg.” Students wrote those words out on the treble clef staff, with each word getting its own staff. I had them write out quarter notes, but you could also use whole notes so you don’t have to worry about stems going up or down.

Treble clef word rough-draft

Students created a rough draft using plain words with normal letters. They put a box around each treble clef word, so they would know to write them out on the treble clef when they did the final copy.

Final draft for the same student

Students then created their final copy, and decorated it if they had time. (One thing I would do differently next time: only provide light colors. Some of my kids colored with dark colors and then got sad when their story was hard to read.) We then projected them on the board and solved several of the treble clef stories. Students had a blast solving the stories of other students!

Here are a few of my favorites:

 

Check out that spider-man!

This story cracked me up!

"The reason he eats cabbage is to be green."

My kids really loved this project. I would like to do something similar with an older grade next year, but have them  perform their stories and play the notes on tone bars. It's a great project though, and I hope you find it useful for your students!