Prep A caught up with the other Prep classes this week. Here is the brainstorm they did:
All classes continued to think about the structure, identifying musical structures using the words verse, chorus, bridge and introduction. Lots of amazing thinking. We used some ‘oldies’ to help us think about structure:
Y.M.C.A. (Village People)
We Will Rock You (Queen)
Happy Birthday (the Stevie Wonder version!)
Listen to your favourite music with your child at home (any language) – see if they can spot the chorus (if there is one)!
This week, Prep classes started to think about a new stand alone music unit with the central idea:
Compositions can be organised
using musical structures.
The students first completed a pre-assessment to determine their initial understandings of the words that we will focus on. Some great ideas! We will look back at these charts at the end of the unit to see how their thinking changes.
(Prep A will do this next week – they missed one lesson this week due to the Spring Break).
We then started to think about the way a song is structured. Using the song ‘Penny Lane‘ by The Beatles we started to learn about three different parts of a song - ‘chorus’, ‘verse’ and ‘bridge’.
The students listened very carefully and identified the structure as:
V C V B C V C C
We will continue to explore this unit for the remainder of the school year.
Prep classes are currently working with Mr. Ko. They will have one dance and one performing arts lesson per week during this time. This week was the final session with Mr. Ko – back to two performing arts classes per week with Miss Hodgson as normal next week!
This week Prep classes were continuing to explore fairy tales through drama. We had fun playing with ‘mixed-up’ fairy tales, taking different characters, places and events from the stories we know and mixing them up! Here are some pictures of Prep D in action:
This week 1A, 1B and 1C have started to think about their upcoming How The World Works unit about animals. We started with a brainstorm of animals (forgive the drawings – they are mine!):
1A
1B
1C
Then we started to explore how we could represent these animals and their characteristics through drama. We used a mime game and we had to guess which animal the others were trying to be!
This week 1A, 1B and 1C completed their summative assessment for the music notation unit. It was really good to see how much the students had learnt as most of them were able to complete the task without help. We focused on four points as our success criteria, looking for evidence that each student:
writes correct number of beats in each bar (the students could choose to use 3/4 or 4/4 time)
includes other relevant musical symbols to notate rhythm (e.g. treble clef, bar lines)
uses a variety of whole, half, quarter notes and rests
is able to play own composition on a musical instrument.
The students’ work will be added to their portfolio. Here’s the assessment sheet we used:
Prep classes have been studying the words to a few favourite Christmas tunes to sing at their Christmas sing-a-long on Thursday 20 December. Feel free to practice the words at home:
This week Pre Reception have been exploring some action songs in performing arts this week. We have been moving our bodies to some great children’s songs, including these:
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