Chuck Stoffle

In this activity my students were asked to cut out the body percussion squares which represented specific sounds.  These were: snapping with your fingers, clapping with your hands, stomping with your feet and tapping your knee with your hand.  Then students were asked to glue their 16 squares onto the song page in which ever order they chose.  It could be a pattern or just random.  Next they practiced “playing” their body percussion song and also traded with others to play their songs.  Finally, each student performed their song in front of the class.  They loved being song writers and performers.

A colleague passed along this web site which lists every type of music around the world including the various artists and their songs.  It is really quite incredible.

http://everynoise.com/engenremap.html

Enjoy

As spring was approaching my kindergarten classes wanted to do something where we could create the sounds of spring.  So we brainstormed the sounds and decided to draw “spring sounds” first then try to create the sounds.  From their ideas I created a template for them to use which had lightning, frogs, birds, trees etc. and they used this to draw their “Sounds of Spring” picture on tracing paper.  This way they could spend more time creating the scene and not worry about the detail of the shapes.  I also made a couple of samples to provide some ideas in addition to providing actual pictures of the sounds we were trying to create.  After they spent about 20 minutes working on their drawings we chose one to attach the sounds to.  Since we chose a rain storm scene the students picked our shakers for rain, and a drum & symbol for thunder.  Here is our process with the final creation, in video format, at the end.

The video can be found at the link below…

This week we played instrument bingo.  It’s a simple game where kids listen to sound clips of instruments, online, then put the bingo chip on the game card covering the instrument they think makes that sound.

The game cards can easily be created on word using clip art from Google images.  It does take a little time to actually make the cards.  The simplest way is to print out the game cards on full sheet label paper then adhere them to really heavy card stock.  The bingo chips are actually poker chips.

For the sound clips I used:
http://www.dsokids.com
http://www.soundsnap.com

I drew instrument names randomly and then pulled up the sound on one of the two web sites.  It was almost as quick as using a bingo machine.

It was a great activity for assessing instrument awareness and sound connections.  The kids really enjoyed it.