Week of June 1

Welcome to HCA Joyful Music

Featuring our Early Childhood Music Makers

As our school year comes to a close, I am reflecting on all the fun and joy we had in our Early Childhood Music classes. Despite the challenges we faced this year, our classes were filled with song, dance and laughter. Here are a few highlights from the year. 

Nursery 2

https://youtu.be/DbLHdprEvhw

https://youtu.be/PDT-wHXL9yo

Nursery 3

https://youtu.be/s3d76WFS8HI

https://youtu.be/DIgGQN6jfes

Pre-K

https://youtu.be/Xmh3U4BzJwg

https://youtu.be/e0u6oIAdKso

Kindergarten 

https://youtu.be/fHqrpGcGGwo

https://youtu.be/_eb-dB_FXZU

Kindergarten Composers!

Have a great summer!

Week of May 17

 

Welcome to HCA Joyful Music

Featuring our Early Childhood Music Makers

There is a difference between rhythm and beat in music. In our music classes, we work on both. We work on keeping a steady beat while we play or sing a song. We practice feeling macro and micro beats (or big and little beats as I sometimes say to the children) in various time signatures, duple, triple, and asymmetric. We isolate rhythm patterns separately from the songs. Feeling the beat and  keeping a steady beat is a developmental music skill that we work on week to week. Check out our Nursery 3 class with the chant, Bee, Bee, Bumblebee, in this video here.. You will notice that we play with the beat, switching from macro and micro.

Week of May 10

 

Welcome to HCA Joyful Music

Featuring our Early Childhood Music Makers

We are rounding out our year in music class with friendship, fun and movement.  The children have been learning some  entertaining dances, such as The Chicken Dance and The Macarena.  Maybe you can try them with your child as home. They can show you their dance moves! 

We have also been preparing for the end of the school by learning to sing songs about kindness and friendship.  The children are doing very well with these songs. (You may have heard them singing at home.)

Kindergarten Composers!

The Musical Alphabet

The PsP Bells App

Our Kindergarten class is coming to the culmination of their music composition project.  Each child has used the Musical Alphabet, the PsP Bells app on the iPad, and colored markers to write several original 4 beat measures.  This week each child chose one measure to be part of our original Kindergarten song.  The children wrote their measure on sentence strip which we will arrange as a class into musical phrases and finally a song.  

It has been so much fun watching the children in their creative process! They are making musical  discoveries and sharing their music with friends! 

Week of May 3

Welcome to HCA Joyful Music

Featuring our Early Childhood Music Makers

May is here!  Spring has sprung and we are in the home stretch of our school year!  Phew!  It’s been a year like no other.  Thankfully we have been able to spend the year in the classroom together.  We are celebrating the end of this extraordinary year with songs about kindness and friendship and we are focusing on joy and fun in music class. 

Our Nursery 2 always enjoys a good play along.  This song, I Need You, by John Batiste is so much fun that the children couldn’t listen to it without dancing so we danced and played along and had a ball! You can check out the fun here.

Week of April 26

 

Welcome to HCA Joyful Music!

Featuring our Early Childhood Music Makers

    Our early childhood music classes allow our students to have a fun musical experience and help them develop as young musicians.  Addtionally, our music classes help to reinforce other skills such as: language development, socialization, listening, following directions. auditory memory and so much more!

   Our Nursery 2 students had fun this week singing and acting out the song Five Green and Speckled Frogs. This music activity helps to reinforce a counting lesson Ms. Kerno introduced to the children last week.  As the children sang and acted out the song, they also worked on listening, following directions and identifying numbers 1 - 5.  They had great fun pretending to be the frogs and jumping into the pond. You can view their froggy fun here.

Our Kindergarten students are continuing to work on their composition unit with the Musical Alphabet.  This week they began composing and writing various 4 beat measures.  This activity helps to develop music literacy as well as decoding, visual discrimination, color correspondence and math skills.  Composing and playing their own music gives the children a real sense of ownership and accomplishment.  They are doing a wonderful job with the unit. We are on our way to composing our original Kindergarten song!