Pitch Matching

What are favorite songs, game-songs, exercises, etc. that you like to use to check/teach pitch matching, and/or high voice?

A couple that I have used so far this year that have worked well are:

• The "Arioso Chair"--a fancily decorated, "magical" chair that when you sit in it, you can only sing. My pre-k/kindergarten class ate it up.

• "Oh my, no more pie"-- a long song with lots of words that works well for echoing.  It just repeats Mi-Do-La,  over and over.

• And the classic "Yoo-hoo, Molly" on sol-mi.

I'd like to hear your favorites. :)

Behavior Note

The note below is based on what my host teacher used during my student teaching. Last year, I had no behavior system in place, so I am hoping that this will help me have better results in the classroom. If a student has been warned, and continues to cross the line, this note gets sent home with the student and the student and parent together come up with a plan to fix the behavior.

Behavior Note

Any comments or suggestions?

Stephanie

Introducing Solfege

I want to use solfege with my classes, and for the returning students, it has been introduced. Unfortunately, about 2/3rds of my third and fourth grade class are new to our school.

What are strategies that have worked for introducing solfege to students who have no prior learning, especially when they should be beyond the sol/mi stage?

--Kate

First day of school ideas

I started school here in India about 4 weeks ago, but a lot of people have their first day of school coming up soon.

• What are your favorite ideas for the first day of class?
• What are things that turned out to not work so well on the first day?
• What classroom prep did you do that you're really excited about? Posters, materials, etc. 

--Kate

Here we go...

Welcome friends!

This blog is for all of us to share, to post ideas, suggestions, advice, questions, funny stories, or complaints about life teaching music.  I hope that a focus of the blog can be about teaching elementary general music, but it doesn't need to be confined to that.  I will officially be the moderator because the blog is on my account, so please tell me names of anyone who would like to be added as an author.

I hope we can all find this to be useful!  Spread the word!

--Kate