Music Making

Monday 15th June We hope you all had a good weekend. Today we started our theme for this week; Melody & Harmony. When we arrived this morning we noticed that there was a large floor piano on the carpet area. To play this piano we needed to use our feet and when we stepped on the keyboard it played the note. There were other buttons too so that we could change the sound to be a xylophone, a trumpet etc. It was great fun and we were soon moving up and down the piano. Also on the table was another small keyboard which Riko really enjoyed playing. She knows how to play and started playing ‘twinkle, twinkle, little star’ to the teachers with a big smile on her face. In the library area Nile and Kosei enjoyed the toy electric guitars and were soon strumming away on the wires. Gaby chose to be the ‘teachers helper’ and as part of her job responsibility came to the fish tank to feed the class goldfish; Sean, Marc and Liam. On the main table we saw lots of empty tissue boxes, some card tubes, some elastic bands and colored markers. Ayaka was showing everyone how to make a guitar from the art materials. First we decorated the tissue box and then joined two card tubes together to make the neck of the guitar. We then used some elastic bands and further card pieces to construct the bridge and strings for our guitar. We enjoyed playing the guitars and used them later in circle time with Ayaka. After clearing away the toys and snack we all read a book together with an old rhyme called “I’m a little teapot’ which had some great pictures in it. At the back of the book was the music score with all the notes. They look different to the alphabet for words. The park was very warm and we made sure we took our water bottles with us. In circle time we did our calendar and then we sang a tune called ‘Copycat’ where Ayaka made a sound e.g. clapping hands, tapping the floor and we all had to try and copy her. This was fun and lead us into us making a list of musical instruments that we could think of. We thought of: guitar, violin, drum, piano, harmonica, whistle, flute maracas and castanets. We saw some of these in the classroom and want to try them tomorrow. Ayaka then showed us how we can make the ‘Doh, Rei, Me’ song using the small keyboard. We saw the guitars we made in the morning and Ayaka showed us how we can also make the notes using the toy guitar. We had a special book time with Liezel who sang the ‘Hickory, Dickory, Dock’ song and also ‘Humpty Dumpty’. For the last song we made to two teams and say between each other’s feet. We then did the actions and sang to ‘Row, Row, Row your boat’ but started at different times to make it a little harder. It was a good first day for our music week and we want to do more music tomorrow.