Music Theme Activities - Thursday March 14, 2013

Our Tuesday and Wednesday were busy this week, but Thursday provided us with an opportunity for some structured activities related to music.

Plan: 

1.)  Music note worksheet for RJ (I'm actually going to slip this in with his homework since he's likely to resist any sort of worksheet if it's in addition to his homework, which he generally despises).  I normally despise worksheets too, but I wanted to see how this one would go, and I wanted to see if he remembered any of the note values from Monday.

2.) Music Mat Activity

From: http://deceptivelyeducational.blogspot.com/2012/01/music-measure-of-math.html

3.) Drinking Straw Pan Flute

From: http://deceptivelyeducational.blogspot.com/2012/04/making-magic-drinking-straw-flute.html

How it went:

1.) While he was skeptical that this was actually part of his school homework (smart kid!), he went along with doing it anyway.  While I might be biased in saying this, he did seem more engaged in this worksheet than the standard math worksheets he gets from school.  He is still working on remembering how many beats per note, but we've only introduced this, and he's remembering a lot.  I will have to try some more complicated math problems with notes, since once he translated the notes into numbers, his answers came pretty fast.

2.) I LOVE this music mat activity.  It was good for further learning the beat values of the notes and rests, and then required RJ to utilize his mathmatical reasoning to put together various combinations of notes (numbers) that add up to 4.  Plus, it was NOT a pencil and paper activity, which helped keep his interest because he's been rejecting any sort of pencil-and-paper activity because he is inundated with them at school.  While it was clearly more for RJ than L, L did seem interested enough to watch and he even (accidentally) put a whole note in a measure, which was a correct solution!  RJ made L feel really good by complimenting him on doing the right thing, and we made sure to tell him that a whole note was 4 beats and so it had a measure all to itself.  RJ liked the hands on aspect of it and worked through a couple of different combinations of notes and rests to make 4 beat measures.  This was also our introduction to rests.  We will definitely take this out again! (In fact, we did break it out again today to show daddy!)

Yes, he's dressed as Harry Potter. 

3.) I think I have a new favorite blog, because the drinking straw pan flute was also a success.  It obviously doesn't sound like much, because it is made of drinking straws.  However, its simplicity was key here.  I liked that L (age 3) was able to participate quite a lot.  He was able to cut the straws on the lines (that RJ and I measured together), and helped tape them together.  And he liked cutting the straws on the line so much that he kept cutting at the scrap ends of the straws too.  So he got more cutting practice!  And RJ not only learned that the shorter straws had the higher pitch, but also got some good practice counting by twos when we measured where to cut the straws to vary the pitch (each straw got shorter by 2 centimeters and I made him tell me the total that we had to measure for each one).  Overall, a very successful project!