Ms. Virginia Weaver's class at Ladera del Norte Elementary School is learning all about rhythmic responses and music literacy to develop their relationship with the Orff approach. Students improvise a 4-beat rhythmic response to a 4-beat call given by Ms. Weaver. This instruction prepares the students to refine their improvisations and write them down to become compositions in the future! The students also did a movement and singing warm-up, in which student leaders took charge while the teacher accompanied them on the piano. This warm-up facilitates ensemble listening and directing attention to the conductor, while also giving different students a leadership role in the classroom.
After the warm-up, students did a mindfulness activity using Hoberman spheres correlating diaphragmatic breathing (expanding and contracting fully). This is excellent practice for vocal and instrumental music such as wind instruments! They added movement exploration involving expanding and contracting bodies as a prep for future creative movement exercises which also tie into the Orff method. Our core lesson revolved around a rhyme about peanut butter pie and owning up to eating the whole thing! Students shared their favorite dessert they would eat all of. Ms. Weaver instructed using body percussion while saying the rhyme to outline the tonic and dominant notes in C pentatonic. Those pitches and rhythms became the ostinato known as a bordun to accompany the piece.
Students used their favorite desserts as a springboard for improvisation in a call-and-response with the teacher. Ms. Weaver asked if they ate all the peanut butter pie and the students answered yes or no and what they ate instead. This was scaffolded to students tapping the rhythm of their response on mallets, then playing the rhythm of their response on only the tonic note, and then adding neighbor notes. Finally, an end-of-class performance was put together in which students volunteered to be soloists and students were given an exit ticket to show Ms. Weaver what element of the day's learning goals they would need more help with for next time. Future lessons will have the students learning a given melody for the rhyme and helping students gain more confidence by adding more pitches to their improvisations as well as having students taking over leadership by creating new calls and eventually notating a refined improvisation/composition on staff paper to share with other students to read!
Amazing job to Ms. Weaver for her dedication to music education and for her accomplishment in receiving the John Batcheller Award for Excellence in Teaching Music in the Elementary Schools from the NM Music Educators Association. The Ladera students are learning so much from Ms. Weaver and they are having fun doing it! Go Hornets!