Today in MusIQ Club!

Great work today everybody!  Your music reading is coming right along and your posture was beautiful today.  Remember to sit with your back straight, shoulders and elbows relaxed and fingers rounded even when you are practising, so that you don’t develop any bad habits – it’s hard to get rid of them once your body learns them.

We started class by talking a little more about the instruments in an orchestra and the different sounds they make.  Do you remember some of the groups of instruments?  Strings, brass, woodwinds, percussion.  Can you name an instrument from each of these groups?  Do you think your parents can name an instrument from each group?  Test them and find out!  Some of them make high sounds, some make low sounds and some have a wide range of sounds.

You remembered a lot about Mr. Beethoven.  Today, after a quick review in lesson 5 with Mr. Beethoven, you had a brand new teacher for lesson 6 Itai – Mr. Bach.  Do you remember what he told you about his life when he introduced himself?  We’ll talk some more about him next week and find out what Quinn remembers from his lessons with Mr. Bach.  We’ll also learn a little more about Quinn’s teacher, Mr. Joplin.

Mr. Bach introduced you to holding notes today and the train game helped you practise holding notes for the right amount of time.  You did a fantastic job at reading the music and holding the notes in your lesson and practise session pieces today Itai.

Quinn worked some more on his ‘ant tunnels’ (which are getting very nice), fingering and playing with two hands with Mr. Joplin and started some more work on the musical alphabet.  I love the piece you composed during you lesson today!  Your compositions are getting more and more complicated.  You also had a new game to practise building the musical alphabet.  We all played a game to help recognize notes that are one step apart and we had a tie finish – not a mistake to be seen – congratulations!  Quinn also worked on some finger number playbacks.  We’ll continue these in the coming weeks.

I would like both of you to pay close attention to rhythm this week – when you are listening to music, practising your clap backs or improvising.  With the clap backs (or playing back the rhythms in Children’s Music Journey), remember that it is easier when you repeat the phrase or counts out loud as you clap or play.  This will help you keep an even rhythm.  You both did a great job at emphasizing the 1st beat when we were clapping in groups of 4 and 3.  Can you find count “1″ when you listen to different pieces of music on the radio?  Try clapping to the music.  Gradually, as you get used to counting out loud, it will get easier to count in your head.  Counting is especially important now that both of you know how to play holding notes and need to be able to tell the difference in the length of different notes.

Here is a worksheet for you to complete this week Itai: Higher and Higher – Maze.  Next week we will look at notes getting higher and higher and lower and lower with Mr. Bach and Miss Melody.

Quinn – you can complete this finding the 3 beat groups worksheet and keep practising clapping 4-beat measures and 3-beat measures, making sure that count 1 is a little stronger each time.

I look forward to our next class.  Have a great week!

Kersti

Filed under: St. Margaret's Bay Elementary