New This Week -- Lesson 9

Lesson #9

1. On Top of Spaghetti: Today was just an introduction to this well-loved song. Eventually, it will train our ears to hear a broken chord accompaniment, sing harmony using that accompaniment and also allow us to practice our autoharp playing skills.

2. Drunken Sailor: This is a silly song that actually teaches us quite a few essential musical elements. We learn simple song form in identifying cadences and phrases. Each form has a different action, which helps our kiddos to recognize when the form changes.

3. Fox Hunt: This is our new puppet show! What did you think? With each of these new shows we learn to identify classical form and rhythmic patterns...all while having fun pretending to be different characters! Ingenious!

4. Clap bug rhythm without seeing the cards: Today we eliminated the bugs and clapped only to the rhythm notation. Sneeky, eh? These kids don't even know how much they are learning!

5. Spatial Skills: Using our Jungle Rhythm song today we all pretended to be a different jungle animal. With the help of our chart we were able to subdivide the beat and see visually the space that each animal (or note) would get in relation to the others. Remember that this spacehelps us to see how to divide the time.

6. How subdividing rhythm looks -- abstract notation: This skill was taught using the technique explained in # 5 above.

New This Week -- Lesson 8

Lesson #8

1. Are You Sleeping?: This well-known children's song is one that we use to practice our solfeg symbols and practice audiation. Pretty soon we'll practice harmony using a round.

2. B-I-N-G-O: The internal beat is what you "feel" when you clap the letters that aren't sung. Along with emphasizing an internal beat we also re-enforce the rhythmic pattern.

3. Clap bug rhythms without saying them: How exciting! We know these backward and forward so today we take out the words and only clap.

4. Audiation with Primary Chords: When we sing the chords and leave one out we allow the children to audiate that chord, or in other words, hear it in their head even though we're not singing it.

Please note parents that pre-registration has begun! Get signed up for a class quickly before registration is opened to the public on March 1. If you love LPM, share the love with a friend! Every referral that registers gives you a $15 credit for fall's tuition...who wouldn't love that?!

New This Week -- Lesson 7

Lesson #7

1. Dinosaur Song: This is one of my favorites! This fun song teaches us steps and skips on the staff as well as on the bells. We have those concepts independently but not incorporated in a song yet, so this song applies the knowledge.

2. Sleep, My Treasure: One of the benefits of LPM is parent-child bonding. While this song teaches minor tonality and vocal channeling it also gives us the chance to hold our little kiddos and rock them to the beat. As we share this experience together the concepts are solidified even further. Ingenious!

3. Playing a song from notated music: Now that we are virtually professionals at identifying steps and skips we applied it today to play what we saw from our music. It stills floors me every time these kids read music at such a young age! Way to go!

New This Week -- Lesson 6

Lesson #6

1. El Gallo: This song teaches harmony using a round. It also allows us to practice our autoharp playing as well as reading our chord maps. (And the kids learned a little Spanish too!)

2. A Frog Went a-Hoppin': Today we simply got our feet wet (ha, ha!) learning this song, but pretty soon we'll figure out that it teaches us leaps. We'll learn these leaps not only on our bells but also the notation on the staff.

3. Subdividing a beat: This is a very tricky concept that LPM makes easy by using our Jungle Animals. The kids were elephants (half notes) while I was a lion (quarter notes). We heard both animals "walking" at the same time, teaching us the relationship of half and quarter notes in subdividing a beat.

4. Major/minor chords and tonality: We have labeled major and minor as happy and sad, but today we saw that changing the middle note of the chord is what makes that happy or sad sound. We also introduced the terms "major" and "minor". Learning chord structure as a 5 year old....who knew it could be done?!

New This Week -- Lesson 5

Lesson #5

1. Umburra: This song is reinforcing hearing the beat of the music. As we pass our stick on the beat we chant "pass-pass-pass-pass" to overemphasis what that beat is.

2. Play a skip on the bells: We can sing a skip, identify it's notation on the staff and now we can even play it on our bells! The cue words are "we skip just one note".

3. Rhythmic notation: Our bugs just turned into "rhythm bugs" or "musical bugs" as we called them in class today. We were able to decipher each rhythm card and then lay it out with the corresponding bug to learn the notation of the rhythm. Now we know what 16th notes, 8th notes, quarter notes and half notes look like as well as what rhythm they represent. Hurray!!