Manipulative Monday: Review Cards

One of the battles I constantly fight as a music teacher is forgetfulness. When you see your kids only once or twice a week, it is a battle that will never stop. I don’t want to waste time going over already learned concepts every other second, so we regularly review the concepts already covered.

Every day with intermediate grades, I have two or three review questions on the board so students have a task to focus on as soon as they are in the room. We go over them very quickly, and this does help them to remember concepts. Sometimes, however, students more than one or two questions to make sure they stay on top of previously taught concepts. This is even more true with grades that are about to take summative semester tests. Partner review cards are a great way to help review and keep students engaged.

Can I tell you how much I love the dollar store? I LOVE IT A LOT. There are so many good things you can use as manipulatives, and for a lot less than official manipulatives online or at teacher stores. This summer, I found these beauties at Dollar Tree and stocked up, knowing they would come in handy. They come in packs of 24, so I picked up several of each to be ready for the larger classes.

The game is simple. Students have a card that is either a concept or a definition/example. Students get a card and silently move (I use a musical timer) to find the person who has the accompanying card. For first and second graders, I let them whisper to help students who may not be to the point of silently reading yet. Once students find their partner, they talk for a few moments to make sure they can justify why they think the two cards go together. We check a few groups as a class, and then the students have 10 seconds to trade cards with someone who was not their partner. This sets us up for another round.

Here is a second grade example.

I like this game because it gets kids up and moving, gives them a chance to talk with several partners, and really reinforces previously learned knowledge. I focus on getting students to justify why they chose the answer, really making them think about their reasoning. My school is also focusing on accountable talk, and this activity is a good opportunity for students to practice those skills. This is a great review for any definition-heavy subject as well. I've found this game much more effective than more traditional reviews with paper and pencil.

Have fun with this game, I hope your kiddos love it as much as mine do!

Lit Lesson: Going On a Lion Hunt

Man, my first graders are loving this book! It is very similar to “Bear Hunt” but in a different climate. The African setting sets up good opportunities for students to be on many instruments, including drums.

The plot of the book is simple. Two girls go looking for a lion to hunt, but instead find that they have to go through long grass (swish swash), a lake (splish splash) , a swamp (squish squash), and a cave (tip toe).

I start by reading the book without sound effects, then with them. We review sound effects and how we make them, and then read the story again with sound effects.

The next step is my favorite: taking sound effects to instruments! With kindergartners I just tell them which instrument we should try, or give them a few to choose from. But with first graders, they are on their own.

We look at four categories to determine which instrument we should use:

• Loud or Quiet
• Long or Short
• Wood, Metal, or Other
• Click, Scrape, Ring, Jingle, or Rattle

My district uses thinking maps, so I use a bubble map to get students thinking about how to describe the sound. Then, we find an instrument that fits our map. I like using the map, because it stops kids from choosing instruments just because they are fun. I used to have students who wanted to pick the thunder tube for EVERY sound, because they just liked it so much! This helps to streamline the process and keep kids on track. Once we have instruments for the sounds, we do the book again with sound effects.

  

Map 1 with the sound effect, map 2 with the instrument we choose that fits the adjectives.

Next, we add melody:

I like using a pentatonic melody, but you could easily use the camp song melody.

Eventually, we add in drums to the rhythm of the song. I have the students decide which words should be a bass sound, and which ones should be a tone sound.

This is a great book to do in class, or it can easily be extended to be a program.

I hope your kids enjoy this book as much as I do!

Lit Lesson: Wide Mouthed Frog

I just love this book. The art is fantastic as well!

One of the first things my kindergarteners do when they walk by my room is to point at my instruments and beg to play them. I don’t blame them one bit. That’s what music is when you are 4-5 years old; instruments in your hand, making noise.

Enter a book I recently found at Goodwill and love: The Wide Mouthed Frog! I use the popup version by Keith Faulkner and Jonathan Lambert; you can get it from amazon here. (There is also a similar book here that uses different animals.)

In the book, a wide mouthed frog (who eats flies) meets a bird, a mouse, and a big green alligator. The kids love the pictures, and it is a good opportunity to have them create sound effects. We read the book without sound effects, then read the book again with sound effects to compare and contrast the two versions.

What I use in this lesson: the book, animal cards, and instruments

After students have read the book and know it fairly well, I pass out cards that represent the sound effects we make during the story. The groups I used were the frog, the flies, the bird, the mouse, and the alligator. There is also a giant splash at the end of the story, which I have everyone do. We read the story again, with each group only making sound effects for their animal. This helps minimize mistakes later, when students get instruments.

The next step is instruments. This was the first time my kindie kids had instruments, so we talked a LOT about instrument respect before handing out the goods. J We then did the book with instruments. We do the book several times and switch spots each time, so students have opportunities to try more than one instrument. With the instruments in my room, I use a frog guiro for the frog, shakers for the flies, triangles for the bird, sand blocks for the mouse, and castanets for the alligator.

The final step is to record students playing during the book, and having them listen. Students get so excited! I will also make a big deal of e-mailing the recording to their teachers.

Hope you and your kiddos enjoy this fantastic book!

I love that it all fits in my big blue box!

The Summer Of Books

My goal this summer was simple: find as many books for my classroom as possible, for as cheap as possible. Then, find the best way to use those books in class… Preferably BEFORE there are 25 kindergarteners in my room, staring at me their with adorable kindie-kid eyes. (Those eyes are located right above the kindie-honest mouths, AKA motivation to be over-prepared.)

Why not libraries, you ask? I’ve tried them, I really have. I promise. But I’m terrible about re-using books. I will use one book several times a year. When teaching music to K-5, it’s a surprisingly easy thing to do. I will also shamefully admit I’m terrible about returning them in two weeks. I see my classes once a week, and two class periods just isn’t going to be enough if I decide to base a grade’s program on a book. I also happen to really like my school’s librarian, and would prefer not to make her angry with my bad library habits. Plus, buying them now means I can avoid borrowing in the future, so buying books seemed like the best option for me.

Amazon is an amazing place, don’t get me wrong. But I have found that even with no shipping thanks to Prime, the cost of new books adds up quick. So, my first stop was the thrift stores. ALL OF THEM. I went to every thrift store in my city and positively plundered the children’s book sections. I got a lot of dirty looks from moms, and I’m certain a few people thought I was crazy, but a .99 cent book is a powerful incentive. I found books of every kind, and quite a few of them were ones I had never heard of before.

I spent some of my summer mentoring new music teachers in my district, and here is one question I got a lot: What do you look for in a book, and how do you know it will work in your classroom? While digging through piles and piles of categorized books that seemed to be a mix of out-dated Disney characters, books teaching toddlers to say “please” or use the bathroom, and absolutely perfect books for my music classroom, I looked for three main things:

1. Reading Level. Even when using a book with an intermediate grade, I keep to a K-2 reading level. Narration in higher-leveled books can get LONG. I like to have the kids making as much music as possible, and primary books deliver.
2. Repeated structures and refrains. Another great thing about primary level books is they tend to have a lot of repetition. A repeated phrase in the book is an easy opportunity to add a sung refrain, or a chant.
3. Onomatopoeia. Sound effects are huge in my state’s curriculum for K-1, and even for older kids they are very easy to transfer to instruments.

Did I find anything? HECK YES I DID. Eric Carle books, folk tales, short poetry books, you name it. Some of the very specific books I wanted (thanks to Pinterest) weren’t to be found, so I did make a pretty gigantic order to Amazon. But it wasn’t nearly as big as it could have been!

I will be going into more detail about what I do with each book soon. I hope you find a book that makes you do the happy dance!

Here are just a few books recently added to my classroom library!