It's a New Year! Time to make some music!

Post date: Jan 8, 2013 6:55:11 PM

We are back to school again after our two week break, and it's time to get back to music learning. The Holiday Program was great fun, but because we were working with the same three songs for awhile, it was a little difficult to keep learning new things.

Second graders will continue to reinforce their audiation skills. Learning will be facilitated through a variety of songs and chants in many different tonalities and meters. These "classroom" songs and chants are short and usually done without recorded music accompaniment.

We will continue to practice audiating macro and microbeats within a given meter. We reinforce those skills be asking students to generalize (without teacher guidance) while listening to new music. We also begin to explore rhythmic improvisation. Improvisation is creating music in real time with specified guidelines (duple/triple meter).

We will continue discussing what makes a melody. We audiate and identify the resting tone and tonality within each song we sing. We also learn that melodies may begin or end on the resting tone, are organized into phrases, and have patterns that may repeat. We put all of this information into application by creating our own melodies.

We also continue to reinforce and practice what we know about harmony. We identify chord changes within song and accompany our songs. In addition, we begin to use tone instruments to accompany our songs. We learn basic instrument technique and how to play chord roots on the instruments.