Monday Music Manipulatives {Cotton Balls & Bingo Counters}

Welcome to another Monday Music Manipulatives!

I am so excited to share this neat idea that I found from my good friend, Erin Johnson, on her Facebook page. Erin went through all three levels of Kodaly with me at Wichita State University. :)

She had been working on preparing ta rest and was actually doing dictation with it, without labeling it. 

She had found two sided bingo counters and used them to make ta's and ti-ti's. 

Then for the beats with no sound, she passed out some cotton balls, and the students were able to dictate on which beat they heard the piece of silence. I love this idea! Cotton balls are cheap, and fun for tactile learners. 

Today she used the beat charts and left the hearts where they heard a piece of silence blank. They numbered the beats, showed which beat was "empty" and labeled it as silent. She then presented the ta rest notation, moved right to flashcards to practice and on they went!

A big thank you to Erin Johnson for sharing her pictures and letting me blog about her idea!

Do you have a fun manipulative you want to share? Link up below! Here's how:

1) Save my "Monday Music Manipulatives" image from the top of my blog

2) Insert it into your blog post and hyperlink it to this post

3) Blog about your own music manipulatives 

4) Copy your blog link and link up below!

Ideas for Surviving the End of the School Year and a $2 Tuesday Flash Sale

I am linking up today with Amy Abbott and several other music teachers to share some ideas for surviving the end of the school year.

TIPS #1: Keep them moving with singing games and folk dancing

Jump Jim Joe

This is the closest version I could find to the one I do with my kids.I use the recording from the Amidons and I have the inside circle move because it is a shorter distance to travel. When teaching a double circle dance, make sure you are always on the outside so that you can see everyone! This will eliminate a lot of problems.

Our Old Sow

I learned this game from Jo Kirk last summer and my kids LOVE IT!

TIP #2: Keep them "on track" and engaged in music learning until the end. I usually spend the last 2-3 weeks as review time to practice the concepts we got through that year as well as looking ahead to next year to prepare the upcoming concepts for the fall.

I've been using my "Race to the Finish Line" planning guide to keep myself and my kiddos "on track" from January through May.

(click the picture above to see it in my TPT store)

It includes song lists for each grade as well as an excel file for each grade that lays out the different concepts through the second half of the school year.  Since it is in excel, it is totally editable. You can add song titles under each concepts, or move the concepts to a different month depending on where you are in your sequence.

TIP #3 Remember the good times!

Music should be a JOYFUL experience for your students. It is so much fun to take a moment and reflect on the experiences shared together in music. I created some "Music Memories" pages for each grade level so that I can see what they remember most about our year together, their favorite singing game, favorite piece we listened to and more. The packet is totally editable, so you can add your own questions if you think it is something you would be interested in using with your kids.

(click on the picture above to see it in my TPT store)

One more fun thing I wanted to share with you was the a bunch of music teachers will be teaming up for another $2Tuesday on TPT. Enter "$2TuesdayMusicFlashSale" in the search bar on TPT to see all of the hugely discounted items from some amazing TPT music teacher/authors.

The file from my store will be my melodic flashcards for preparing and practicing sol-mi.

(click on the picture above to see it in my store)

These flashcards are amazing resources for melodic transitions between songs. I could have a mystery song on the board like this: 

Starlight Starbright

See Saw

I don't have cards for "2,4,6,8" but I had my kids construct it using the cards from the other songs. Then we added the rhythms above. Next time we will transfer to the staff.

The kit includes 164 flashcards designed to go with the following songs:

Bee Bee Bumblebee
Blue Bird (1st measure)
Come Back Home My Little Chicks
Doggie, Dogggie (1st measure)
Hey Hey Look at Me
Lemonade
Rain Rain Go Away
See Saw Up and Down
See the Old Witch
Snail, Snail (1st measure)
Starlight Starbright

Pitch is shown using: 
Icons only (can be used in the preparation stage)
Icons w/ solfege
Icons on staff
Rhythm stick notation w/ solfa (where rhythms are appropriate)
Icons on staff with solfa
Standard notation with solfa inside note head

What are your tips for surviving the end of the school year?

Making Musical Transitions

When I first started teaching I had no concept of musical transitions. I would simply move from one activity to another. Often during this time the kids would get off task waiting to see what the next activity was going to be. During level 1, I got to see how the fabulous Jo Kirk would weave her songs together through stories and though I am not as creative as she is, I began to create stories to connect the songs I was using with my first and second graders. After my Kodaly Levels 2 and 3, I feel like am better at making MUSICAL transitions.

A musical transitions will guide your students throughout your entire lesson, connecting songs with melodic and rhythmic activities. These should never be drills, but simply a way of getting from point A to point B.

Here are some examples of melodic transitions using the melodic element "fa" and the songs,  "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" transitioning to "Chairs to Mend"

Students sing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" on solfa with hand signs.

Teacher then shows 4 or 8 melodic flashcards. Here's the key. They are NOT FOR DRILL! The flashcards should be purposefully selected, not just "let's do a stack of flashcards". The first flashcard should have some tonal pattern from the song you are coming from and ending with a tonal pattern of the song you are going to. In between are tonal patterns of known songs. I would write down the exact tonal patterns I was going to use in my lesson plans including what songs they are from so that I could have all my visuals ready.

Here's how it would look: 

(pattern from "Twinkle Twinkle"

(pattern from "This Old Man")

(Pattern from "Are You Sleeping?/Brother John")

(pattern from "Chairs to Mend")

Which leads right to our next song! Sing on text then add canon:

Another way to get from songs with similar tone sets would be to use a tone ladder. Taking the same two songs, you could first sing "Twinkle Twinkle" then point to the pitch ladder having students sing on solfa with hand signs. You could do the whole song, then move to song fragments from other known songs ending with your starting phrase of the next song in your lesson. Your tone ladder could be projected onto the board like this:

Or you could use cut outs like these:

Rhythm transition activities:

Another rhythmic transition that could be used here would be flashcards. Again, the use of the flashcards is not for drill, but to guide us from one song quickly to the next for a seamless transition with no wasted time.

I could start with:

(from "Chicken on a Fence Post")

(From "Dinah")

(From "Golden Ring Around the Susan Girl")

(From "Old Brass Wagon")

And off you go with singing "Old Brass Wagon" and performing the square dance!

One of my goals for the upcoming school year is to work on including more musical transitions like these for grades 2-5. What other kinds of transitions do you use? What are your goals for the upcoming school year?

If you like the transition resources I have used in this post, they are all available at my Teachers Pay Teachers Store:

Fa Melodic Transition Staff Cards {FREEBIE}

Tone Ladders (Over 50 Pages of tone ladders that you can project or cut out and put on your board)

Rhythm Flashcards - Available by concept or in a Mega Set-The ones I used in this post were from my tiri-tiri (or tika-tika, takadimi, etc.) set

Featured Item of the Week: La Bundle

I have started doing a featured item of the week in my store. For that week only the featured item will be 20% off. This is the biggest percent that TpT will let us take off of our items, so it's a great time to grab it if it's a product you've been eyeing.

This bundle of songs and resources for teaching "la" contains:

PDF of slides for
-Naughty Kitty Cat
-Snail Snail
-Johnny's It
-Bounce High, Bounce Low
-Lucy Locket
-Ickle Ockle

All are set up for use during prepare/present/practice to allow you to use them however it works best for your concept plan.


I have also included a powerpoint of the Solfa  Street.

Repertoire list for La Songs

Hand Sign Posters for mi, so, and la

Rainy Day Rhythms

My first graders (I don't see kindergarten) are practicing their high and low sounds and getting ready to learn about steady beat and rhythm as "the way the words go" pretty soon.

We are having some great fun with rainy day activities and the timing is perfect as we have been getting some rainy days here in Kansas.

I read a book "Rain Talk" with my kids and I get out my rain sticks and have students help to create the rain storm using the rain sticks. You could use any rainy book. I found this one at Goodwill. I always love to rummage through the cheap books to find ways to tie in literature with my songs. Kids are not read to at home very much anymore, and I feel like this is so important for developing reading skills and imagination so I do my part to help out! This book has some opportunities for vocal exploration and I usually add a sol-mi melody to parts of the text. I sing the song "Rain Rain Go Away" every other page turn and that is their cue that they need to pass their rain stick on to let someone else have a turn.

The kids really enjoy this and I have found that it's a fun way to introduce the song "Rain Rain". 

We put "Rain Rain" on our body scale- "high" on our heads and "low" on our shoulders.  I have these slides like this that I use for high and low:

They are available in my "Rain Rain" collection , my Songs for Spring, or my Sol-Mi Bundle on my teachers pay teachers store. 

I also use my flashcards for this: 

My Sol-Mi flashcard kit had flashcards like this and with the solfege under the icon. This kit is also in the Sol-Mi Bundle.

Next we prepare for steady beat by practicing tapping to the rain drops on the board: 

Once we know I will bring this song back for "The way the words go", "long/short" sounds, and ta/titi.

Once we get to ta-titi, here are some fun activities I have created to go with it!

Team clouds:

I cut out these little rain drops and stick tape on the back and we tape it to the team's cloud every time they get a point. The team with the most raindrops on their cloud wins!

Other ideas:

Match iconic rhythm to real rhythm

You can purchase this game from my tpt store and download a preview of it here.

Lindsay