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Welcome back!

 Welcome Wildcat families!


I am so excited to be starting my 5th year at Whittier. This year our music bulletin board follows a theme that I will be exploring with students of all ages throughout the year which is to think about the questions surrounding music: What is music? Where can music be found? Who makes music? How do we make music? and Why do we make music? Through playing, singing, dancing, and creating I hope all students will explore and think about music in new and exciting ways this year!


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Welcome Back!

We have been having a wonderful year so far. The past 2 weeks students have been acclimating or re-acclimating to the music room procedures and expectations. This week all the students are doing grade-level lessons surrounding steady beat and rhythm. In kindergarten we used play-doh as tortilla dough flour and kept a steady beat to the poem "Tortillitas" See if you children remember the motions and words to the rhyme! "Tortillitas para mama. Tortillitas para papa. Las bonitas para Papa. Las quemaditas para mama" (sorry for the lack of accents in the Spanish lyrics) Students with their play-doh "tortillitas" 1st grade- 5th grade students played "Busted" a game where students pull a stick from a cannister. The stick may have a rhythm on it. If it does, they read the rhythm and keep the stick if it's done correctly. If the stick says "Busted!" the student loses their turn and all their sticks. Next week we will start reviewing melody. ...
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Hope you all are having a wonderful end to your school year- Remember to look to these pages for updates on music at Whittier! 3rd-5th grade https://sites.google.com/op97.org/whittiermusic3-5/home Kindergarten-2nd grade https://sites.google.com/op97.org/whittiermusick-2/home
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Playing Away

This week students in all grades started playing percussion instruments. Kindergarten through 2nd graders played smaller hand drums while 3rd through 5th graders worked on the West African tubano and djembe drums. This week we were specifically discussing that rhythms are composed of long sounds, short sounds, and silences. In the upper grades we played a game "tikatika ti and stop" to work on our rhythmic listening skills. It will get harder as the year goes on. This week the whole school also listened to a piece by a brass ensemble while we did our stretches and learned the song Great Big Stars.
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