Musical Friday

 

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Today we made a special visit  to introduce our musical selves to our wonderful music teacher Jason. In his music room we examined what we know about music making and musical instruments. We discovered we all carry around amazing instruments inside our own bodies and explored our voices learning how to manipulate the sounds we make naturally within a musical context. We were then given a mysterious instrument hidden from view to which we applied our detective skills to try and guess what it could be. We were delighted to find it was a slide whistle and we participated in an activity connecting what we hear to physical movements like drawing sounds with our fingers in the air moving upwards as the slide whistle slid to a higher pitch and moving downwards when the pitch slid lower. Then we even sang along with the slide whistle and our finger-air drawings exercising our ears and voices in pitch matching. We slid out of our whistle activity and right into learning a new hello song and ended our time with Jason with an activity listening to an orchestral piece and using "dancing hand spiders" which allowed us to translate musical concepts like tempo and dynamics into visual expressions such as when the music got softer, our hand spider dancing matched with smaller dance moves, and when the tempo picked up our hand spider dancing matched with faster twirls and wiggles.

Our musical connections actually started yesterday when Samuel shared of some musical instruments brought back from the Dominican Republic by his parents. The three different percussion instruments both excited our music loving ears and inspired our continued quest to live through acts of kindness and we discussed ways to be kind to these musical instruments so that everyone can continue to enjoy their music.

We had an unexpected musical sharing time with the Doves' class and Kindergarten in which Raji played guitar for us and friends sang and shared music they have learned together.