The months of January and February give us a wealth of topics to draw upon in music class: Martin Luther King, Jr., Freedom, Peace, U.S. Presidents, Valentine's Day, Groundhog's Day, The Winter Olympics, The New Year, 100th Day of School, Chinese New Year, Winter, Friendship, and Love. Not to mention our regularly scheduled events, like our monthly school masses, the 5th Grade state reports, or the 2nd Graders preparing for First Holy Communion. Believe it or not, there is a song for just about every topic or event that is happening around here!
Here are some of the songs your children have been working on since we came back to school in January:
Our 5th,6th,7th, and 8th Graders learned "*Free At Last", a beautiful song about Martin Luther King, Jr. and learned to read the spoken word (rap) as it is rhythmically written out on staff paper in "*Martin Luther King" (MK8). We'll be adding "*Winter Games" to the 5th and 6th grade repetoire, just in time for our Winter Olympics.
In our preparations for what was to have been our January school mass we rehearsed a song in the traditional gospel/spiritual style entitled: "Don't Be Worried" In it, the words remind the listener to "put all your trust in the Lord", a reoccurring theme in many gospel/spiritual songs. Our classroom discussions regarding this brought us the underground railroad ... and lead me to return to them with "*Follow The Drinking Gourd", the traditional song leading many slaves to their freedom.
The 5th Graders, studying weather in science class, will soon learn "*The Water Cycle" in music class.
Our 1st and 2nd Graders found out George Washington "always put his country first", is on the dollar bill AND the quarter by singing two songs: "*George Washington" and "*Who Is On The Dollar Bill?" They also learned a little something more about Abraham Lincoln singing "*Abraham", a gentle, light rock song that gets us "thinking about the man who chose the path to set all of us free."
"*The Months Of The Year", "*The Groundhog Galop", and "*Uno, Dos, Tres" were three songs to help emphasis their learning in the classroom the months of the year, why we have Groundhog's Day, and help solidify their spanish numbering/counting.
Of course, Valentine's Day brings out lots of entertaining songs and we've already begun singing some of them:
"*Valentine", "The Valentine Boogie", "*Wouldja Be My Valentine?", and "*Viva Valentine".
The 1st Graders are studying Penguins, so we just learned two songs to re-enforce our efforts:
*"They Are Penguins" & "The Penguin Polka".
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If you want to listen to or download any of these songs you may do so at this website:http://www.musick8kids.com/Type in the songtitle in the SEARCH box and click ENTER.
