Hello all and welcome back from the long weekend. I hope you had a great weekend with your child! The students were very excited to be back at school and they were ready to learn today! We began our morning by talking about our weekend activities and several students took long car rides to far away places...how fun!
We began our morning with some popsicle stick building with loose parts, designing at the light table, and a number card game. Other students matched tile letters and clips and created the alphabet! A small group of students built in the collaboratory while other students continued to play in the classroom.
As the morning continued, a small group of students worked on planning a performance for the class! Once they were prepared, the rest of the class cleaned up the room and took their seats on the carpet. We talked about how we can be good audience members and the kids talked about sitting on their bottoms, keeping their hands in their lap and staying quiet during the performance. The students took the stage! One student sang the song, while another student hummed along and the last student of the group showed off some dance moves. After the performance, their classmates complemented the performers and this sparked a lot of ideas! Several students wanted to put on a show for the class and teachers. We talked about what we need when we go to a show, such a tickets. A group of students got to work right away on planning their performance. They wrote scripts, collected instruments for their songs, practiced their songs, and created tickets for every classmate and teacher! Meanwhile, we turned on some music in the classroom and the students were able to paint their feelings on our big mural. The students used a variety of paint strokes and colors to portray their feelings. The observer will find smiley faces, along with drawings of a girl, a family, curvy lines, and a mixture of colors to create secondary colors. After painting and listening to the music, the students began to ask about the different instruments they heard while painting. We came together as a group and discussed these wonderings. Some of our wonderings consisted of:
- Who is playing the instruments?
- How do they know what to play?
- How do all the instruments play the same music?
- How do they know when to stop?
- What is on the white paper? Why do they keep looking at the white paper?
- How do they play their instruments?
- Why do some people in the audience sit up high and other people sit down low?
We decided to do some research on this interesting topic. The class decided to watch a video of people playing instruments together and we learned how this group of people can be called an "orchestra." We observed their outfits, the man in the middle who was waving a stick, and how the audience members were behaving during the performance. Several students asked about the white paper the musicians were looking at and want to know what is on the music sheets! We plan to do more research on our wonderings this week! Stay tune for more performances, music, creativity, learning and fun!
