Music Activities - Monday April 15, 2013

The Plan:

1.) Music Mat Activity for RJ during Homework Time /Drawing or Dancing to the Music for L

2.) Drum Rhythms on the Homemade Bongos ( http://mommaphd.blogspot.com/2013/04/co-op-activities-march-19-2013.html , http://deceptivelyeducational.blogspot.com/2012/05/boppin-on-diy-bongo-drums.html )

3.) High, Low, and Middle - Game to recognize pitch
http://www.teachingideas.co.uk/music/highlowandmiddle.htm

How it went:

1.) We didn't end up doing this today - we will another day when we have more homework time before needing to run out to the grocery store.

2.) Both kids did this briefly.  RJ being older matched the rhythms fairly well after a few tries for the more complicated beats.  L was able to match the simpler beats, but mostly wanted to just make his own.  At this point, I'm happy with exposure and him at least trying before going crazy on them!

3.)  I wanted to see if they could tell me if one note was higher or lower than another. RJ was able to correctly tell me if the second note I played was higher or lower than the first. At first he told me that he knew because he was watching my fingers and knew that the higher notes were to the right and the lower notes were to the left (which is interesting because I only told him that once), but when I made him turn around, we discovered that he was also able to use auditory discrimination because he didn't make a single mistake, even when not looking at my hands.  L watched, but didn't participate.  He seemed interested, so I think he was absorbing some of it.  I will have to try it sometime with him alone.

Since RJ was doing so well at the higher or lower game, I decided to grab our cat keyboard  so that he could try to match notes with what I played on our not-as-cute keyboard that I've had since I was a kid.  This was largely a trial and error game since he is not familiar enough with the keyboard nor absolute pitch to be spot on, but he enjoyed playing different notes until he heard that he had found the right one.  Once or twice he would say the note was the same, despite it being an octave lower or higher, but then we'd listen again, and he would say that one was higher, leading the way for me to say that it was the same letter note, but a lower or higher octave.  Unfortunately, despite RJ being engaged, L was much more interested in reaching over and hitting the buttons that start the pre-recorded songs on the cat keyboard, so we let the game end and let L explore the instruments more.