Music at home- Play the black keys!

The piano has a really, really nice feature. While most of us remember accidentals and black keys from piano lessons with fear and trembling, if you play JUST the black keys, you've found a pentatonic scale. And many, many common melodies are solely pentatonic. The example above is from the website http://www.pentatonika.net/-which is a website focused JUST on pentatonic melodies and contains a wealth of songs. Chances are high that one of your child's favorites is playable on the black keys-so sing, play, and try to figure it out! You'll be developing your child's musical ear, their attention and concentration skills, and developing a feeling of accomplishment at the same time.


Other activities from this week:
Practice locating lines and spaces on the staff, and counting from the bottom-first line, 2nd line, first space, and so on. This is a helpful skill in later music reading.

Practice making and reading 4 count rhythms using the quarter note (ta) and the quarter rest (shh) symbols. The song "I like to play the sticks" is designed for this task.

Have fun!

Beyond the music-Jumping Beans week 1

Welcome to another great Kindermusik semester as we begin exploring Latin American music, learn a little piano, a little music reading, and even a little Spanish in our Jumping Beans unit!

Today we learned quarter notes and quarter rests, put them together to make different rhythm patterns, and played these patterns on the piano. We also started to explore the keyboard, finding black keys, white keys, and patterns of black and white keys. We went into the rainforest to see what we saw, danced to Latin American music, and played a part of a melody on a mallet percussion instrument. 

We don't have home materials yet, so please go to play.kindermusik.com and use the digital download card you received in class to download some songs to listen to this week. You might pick ones from class that you especially liked, so that you'll have a digital copy when your home CD arrives, or pick a few others that are good additions to your collection.


Here are some suggestions from class today.

Corre Burriquito
La Cucaracha
Move and Freeze
Mama Paquita


For back to school fun, I also like this album.
I'm the teacher


We still have space for a few more friends in this class and in our Kindermusik classes on Friday and Saturday for younger children as well. If you know of anyone who is interested, please encourage them to come visit us! For more information, they can see http://memphis.edu/cms/childhood.php or contact me

Until next week, have fun making music with kids!

Ms. Donna