With Thanksgiving only one day away, can Turkey find a place to hide from the farmer who’s looking for a plump bird for his family feast? Maybe he can hide with the pigs . . . or the ducks . . . or the horses . . . Uh-oh! Here […]
“Groovy Joe is totally fun. He’s a song-singing, tail-wagging party of one!” Who is Groovy Joe, you might ask? Groovy Joe is a dancing, singing, guitar playing dog and is the literary creation of Eric Litwin, the best-selling author of the original four Pete the Cat books, The Nuts, and now Groovy Joe. […]
One of my favorite things about the Orff Schulwerk philosophy of teaching is the ability to go from something relatively simple to an experience that is complex and exciting. You start with a song, add in movement, add in new layers, add in an ostinato, include a game, move students […]
This post is also featured on the TpT blog! I stumbled across this awesome little gem of a song when I was looking through Bessie Jones’s book “Step It Down” a year or so ago. The kiddos love the song but also go crazy for the accompanying dance. I really […]
Do you know about Zar, the friendly alien, and his broken spaceship? Zar has been a good friend in my classroom for years and has never failed to entrance Kindergarten, 1st, and even 2nd graders! I love turning to Zar when I have a group of kiddos who really need […]
I like a good theme, I won’t lie. For the past week or so I’ve been teaching ocean songs and underwater games to kindergarten and I wanted to share some of the things that have worked really well. Since it’s kindergarten I try and keep activities pretty short but do […]
I learned early on in my music teaching career that I can’t assume anything about kiddos. I learned not to bank on the idea that kids have done something before or learned information somewhere else before coming to my classroom. For example, you might think: “Itsy Bitsy Spider is a […]
“I can do this. I can do this! I’ve only got one more week…. ONE MORE WEEK!” Does that mantra sound familiar? I know that many of you are also psyching yourself up for one more week of high-energy kids who are sugared up from holiday parties and are […]
Teaching the four voices (speaking, shouting, singing, and whisper voices) to my Kinders and 1st graders is something I’ve been doing for years. The four “vocal timbres” are in almost every district curriculum I’ve seen and every textbook I’ve ever looked at. “Why do we teach this concept?” you ask. […]
I had so much fun with this lesson today that I just had to share. I’m continuing to work on sol-mi songs with my Kindergarten friends and had it in my lesson plans to go back and revisit “Rain, Rain, Go Away!” I always love teaching this song around this […]
If you have a rabbit puppet, this lesson is for YOU! I’ve been buying more puppets and experimenting a lot with puppet use for instruction in the classroom lately. I definitely got inspired when I recently attended a local Orff chapter workshop with Lynn Kleiner of Music Rhapsody. She uses […]
A few years ago I purchased one of those classroom pointers that every teacher seems to have (little pointing hand on a stick) when the book fair came through my school. The following year I bought another one because it had cooler colors and was just generally awesome. The problem […]
