A World Journey Through Music

K/K and K/1 musicians have set out on a journey to explore music of the world. Our journey always begins with a mystery… where are we going? Young musicians listen to samples of music from our destination and guess where in the world we might be headed.

Students listened to the following samples to inspire their guesses.

We learned about the rhythms that make up samba music, learned a classic folk song about monkey named Sambalele who’s always in trouble, and played, sang, and danced in the style of Brazil.  We took a brief journey from Brazil to Chile before spring break to learn a folk song and game, “Pavo, Pavo” or “Turkey, Turkey”.

When we return from break, our next mystery destination awaits!

 

2nd Grade Emotion Compositions

Second graders have been discussing how feelings and emotions can be reflected in music by changing the pitch, dynamics, or tempo of a piece.  We’ve discussed and acted out different kinds of emotions, and listened to a variety of musical examples to decipher the emotions expressed in the sounds.

We looked at a variety of different types of music to listen for emotions, and then recorded what we heard by adding emotions to blank faces and using feeling words to describe the emotion.

Listen to this piece by Dmitri Kabalevsky from 5:12-6:58 and decide which song it was for yourself based on the interpretations of the second grade musicians.

Our expressive young musicians then took their knowledge of emotions, feelings, and music, and created short emotion compositions in partnerships.  Each group member was assigned a specific emotion, and chose a percussion instrument to express the dynamics and tempo they might associate with that feeling or emotion.  The group then chose an order for their emotions and had to show a change from one emotion to the next.  Finally, after much planning and rehearsing, the groups presented their short emotion compositions to an audience of their peers, and let the audience members guess which emotions they were hearing in the music.