Happy Friday!
This week in Exploring Music 6 students got a lot of hands on time with the guitar! At the beginning of the week we learned about three new notes that are found on the second string of the guitar. These notes are B, C, and D. Each note has a unique address in our musical neighborhood. B lives on the 3rd line, C lives on the 3rd space, and D lives on the 4th line. Students practiced reading our new notes (as well as our old notes E, F and G) by using a game on the Ipads on Tuesday called NoteDerby! Students were a character riding a reindeer through the snowy woods. In order to advance, students were shown a flashcard of a musical note on the staff and had to correctly identify that note! Ask your student how many questions they were able to answer correctly when we tried a round with all six notes!
This week in Exploring Music 6 students got a lot of hands on time with the guitar! At the beginning of the week we learned about three new notes that are found on the second string of the guitar. These notes are B, C, and D. Each note has a unique address in our musical neighborhood. B lives on the 3rd line, C lives on the 3rd space, and D lives on the 4th line. Students practiced reading our new notes (as well as our old notes E, F and G) by using a game on the Ipads on Tuesday called NoteDerby! Students were a character riding a reindeer through the snowy woods. In order to advance, students were shown a flashcard of a musical note on the staff and had to correctly identify that note! Ask your student how many questions they were able to answer correctly when we tried a round with all six notes!
We also learned about string crossing this week. String crossing is when you play notes on more than one string. This was a challenge for us to move our fingers to the correct frets on the correct string quickly, but with a little practice we got more comfortable and did very well with this concept by the end of the week! On Thursday students found out that they would be performing the song "Ode to Joy" by the famous composer Beethoven for the final guitar test coming up after the winter break. We watched a Brainpop about Beethoven and then took a sight reading challenge where students had to try to play this tricky tune the first time they looked at the music without any time to practice! This was a fun way for us to see how much we will grow in just a few short weeks! After we have perfected "Ode to Joy" it will be fun to look back and see where we started :)
On Friday students learned the first 8 measures of "Ode to Joy". We spent some time learning the melody as a class and then students were given the rest of class time to collaborate and rehearse with classmates. Next week will be a short week for us (only two days!) Be sure to check our blog when we get back from vacation for more updates, pictures, and maybe even videos of us in action exploring the musical language!