Espresso Shot: Two Songs for Sharing Instruments in Kindergarten

Today we’ll look at two specific songs for sharing instruments in Kindergarten. Both these songs use the “pass it down” structure we talked about in episode 34.

 
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Songs:

  • Bell Horses

  • Frosty Weather

Passing Out Instruments:

  • Students sit in a circle. As they sing the song and pat a steady beat, the teacher walks around the outside of the circle and places an instrument behind students’ backs.

Collecting Instruments:

  • Students stand and walk around in a circle while singing the song. As students move, the teacher walks around the circle and collects the instruments.

Espresso Shot: Sharing Instruments with Zapatitos Blancos

Zapatitos Blancos process:

  • Speak the rhyme and play the game

  • Add an ostinato - students come up with any combination of shoe / little

  • When you’re out, choose if you’ll play the steady beat on a tubano or play the rhythm of the ostinato on rhythm sticks or other unpitched percussion

  • Continue playing until the available instrument slots are taken

Strategies for Sharing Instruments

 
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Have you addressed games that include strategies for sharing instruments? I don’t have class sets of most instruments so I’m always trying to plan ways to avoid bored waiting. 

  • Episode 5 talks about ways to pass out and put away instruments and we’ll use some of those same ideas here. 

The Benefit of Not Enough Instruments 

  • Increased chances for modeling 

  • Increased chances for observation (we can see the students better, the students see each other better, the students see us better)

  • Increased chances for independent and interdependent musicianship (students can hear themselves better, and there are fewer places to “hide” in the ensemble)

  • Increased opportunities for classroom management and social reinforcement

    • Who gets an instrument? (Someone who shows they’re ready for an instrument, someone who is my friend or someone I don’t talk to that much. When you get an instrument, what do you say back to that person? How do you treat the instrument?)

  • I actually prefer not giving an instrument to everyone. It lets me notice which students could use help at what times, it helps everyone model things like rest position. Things can sometimes get a little chaotic for me if everyone has an instrument all at once. Everyone has a personal threshold of how much noise is too much noise.

Principles for Sharing Instruments:

Everyone has a job

  • Jobs might include

    • patting the beat while the person next to you plays the rhythm

    • Singing the song

    • Singing letter names

    • Singing solfege while signing

    • Doing a dance or movement activity

    • Clapping an ostinato

    • Playing a game

  • We can choose musical jobs based on pedagogical goals

  • Whatever scaffold they were doing before you handed them the instrument, that’s what they keep doing while others have the instrument. 

Set Expectations

  • Increased opportunities for modeling and observing positive instrument behavior, increased opportunities to highlight positive instrument behavior

  • How do we wait for a turn to play an instrument, and how do we show we’re ready?

    • Possible expectations: Show a quiet thumbs up, sing and pat the steady beat, etc. Musical involvement shows the student is listening to directions, but it also serves as an assessment to see if they’re ready for the instrument. Regardless, everyone has a musical contribution to the ensemble.

  • How do we hold the instrument when we’re done playing? How do we hold the instrument when we’re about to play?

    • Establish rest position and point out how many musicians you see in rest position.

  • How do we pass off the instrument to a friend?

  • How do we respond when we’re not chosen?

    • “I never get a turn.”

    • “I didn’t get a turn this time, and that’s disappointing.”

    • Everyone gets a turn. Not everyone gets a turn today.

Change who is in charge

  • At the end of the song or game, students pass off their job to another student musician who is showing that they’re ready for an instrument.

  • This takes less time

  • Students respond better to peers

  • We have opportunities to build classroom culture (we’re looking for behavior of classmates who are ready, not choosing our very best friends every time)

Structures for Sharing Instruments

For our purposes, we’ll look at games on their own, then divide these structures into learning activities and games. Games are, of course, learning activities in and of themselves. However, they function in a different way in the classroom. The structure we choose will depend on our pedagogical goal for the activity, and the specific skill we want students to practice.

Choosing, Elimination, Guessing, or Chasing Games

These types of games are the most streamlined because the choosing has been determined for us.

  • When you’re out, you move to an instrument and…

    • Play a chord bordun

    • Play an ostinato on unpitched percussion

    • Improvise a melody on barred instruments

    • Improvise a B section between rounds of the game

Double up

We might have more than one student playing an instrument at the same time. This can happen on pitched percussion or unpitched percussion.

Learning activity:

  • Students can help each other figure out a melody by ear on a barred instrument.

    • One plays, the other assists

  • Students play a known melody on barred instruments

    • One plays, the other sings the song, sings on solfege with hand signs, or sings on letter names while pointing

  • Students add a melody to an existing rhythm

  • Students compose a piece for unpitched percussion

Game:

Hunt the slipper: A few customers sing the song while patting a steady beat on the tubano. The cobbler and their assistants sing the song while patting a steady beat on another tubano. At the end of the game, everyone chooses their replacement.

Stations

We might choose to have more than one instrument part happening at the same time. When that’s the case, we might look at instrument stations.

Learning Activity

  • Groups of instruments around the room. Students sing the song and perform the instrument part, then walk to the next station to sing the song and play the new part.

    • Flexible levels of complexity - how many instruments? How many parts? How much partwork independence is there?

    • Simple structure for Alabama Gal in preparation for synco-pa (or any song). Two stations for instruments, two stations to sing the song.

      • Barred instruments on the left side of the room. Students play a chord bordun.

      • The next station is singing. Those students sing and either pat the steady beat or clap the rhythm of the words.

      • The next station is rhythm sticks where students speak and play an ostinato: Alabama gal (ta-di ta-di ta rest).

      • The last station is singing, where students sing and either pat the steady beat or clap the rhythm of the words again.

Game:

  • Stations for rhythm, beat, bordun, ostinato, etc. When you’re out, you choose where you’ll go

  • Stations for different rhythmic endings. Students walk to their choice.

Pass it down

Learning Activity:

  • In a warm up, play the instrument in front of you, then pass to the person on your right

Game:

  • Counting out games (Bee Bee Bumblebee)

Weekend Research: How Do Music Teachers Spend Class Time?

I had a conversation recently with a colleague about how to keep pacing moving throughout a lesson. This friend was getting “stuck” on activities, and wasn’t always able to finish everything on the lesson plan. This is something many of us can relate to! If we know quick pacing is key to student engagement and to maximizing learning, what stops us from moving lessons along? Why do we get bogged down?

I might be tempted to say students talk too much and they get off task. However, if I look at who does most of the talking, it’s probably not the students. It’s probably me.

I say that after reading research, and conducting my own research in the classroom. Let’s look at some studies that have addressed music teacher talking. At the end, we’ll discuss what we can do about it.

 
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Framing the Conversation:

  • The point of this isn’t to make us feel bad about talking. The point is that it’s fun to read research studies, and conveniently, we can control our own talking easier than we can control other people’s.

  • We’ll look at four research studies, their results, and how we might move forward based on the research

Comparison of the National Standards for Music Education and Elementary Music Specialists' Use of Class Time(Orman, 2002)

  • Journal of Research in Music Education

  • Orman, 2002

  • The study

    • Voluntary National Standards for Music Education 

      • (Episode 24 about standards)

    • 30 elementary general music teachers were videoed teaching grades 1 - 6 

    • Class time was analyzed for teacher time and student time, and broken down by the specific type of activity 

  • Results:  

    • Teachers spent the most time talking (46%), followed by modeling (21%) 

      • Modeling defined as the teacher doing something musical.

      • About half that modeling was the teacher modeling alone, and half the modeling was the teacher modeling with students doing something as well.

    • Students spent the most time listening to the teacher (57%) as the teacher talked or modeled 

      • Other activities students did were each less than 10% of the total class time

    • All nine standards were addressed in the teaching 

      •  The most used standards were reading notation and writing notation. The least used standards were creative tasks or decision-making tasks

    • In earlier grades students spent more time singing than in later grades. In later grades students spent more time playing instruments 

      • Improvisation was used in grades 1 - 3 but not in grades 4 - 6 

      • Standards of understanding music in relation to history and culture / the relationship between music, art, and other disciplines were used in grades 3 - 6 but not in grades 1 - 3 

Boler Notes:
There is a natural shift we would expect to see in terms of what activities students do in each grade. In this specific study, students change the actions they take in music class, but the teacher is still talking a lot. That said, in this study, teachers spoke the least in 2nd grade (34% mean of class time) and the most in 3rd grade (55%).

Self-Reported versus Observed Classroom Activities in Elementary General Music (Wang & Sogin, 1997)

  • Journal of Research in Music Education

  • Wang & Sogin, 1997 

  • The Study: 

    • 45 elementary general music teachers filled out a questionnaire (how much time in a lesson do you think your students spend singing, moving, talking about music, reading music, etc.) 

    • Of those teachers, 19 lessons were analyzed for student activities and teacher behavior 

    • Student activities: reading, listening, singing, describing, playing, creating, and moving 

    • Teacher behaviors: Talking or modeling, and providing academic or social reinforcement 

The Results: 

  • Teachers were spending much less time on the activities than they thought they were. Instead, they were talking. 

  • Talking can be giving directions, but it can also be “lecturing,” or “chatting”

  • Student activities: mostly moving, followed by singing, then playing. The least amount of time was given to creating

  • There was some crossover of time, however. When teachers were talking, students weren’t doing engaged in a musical task. When teachers were modeling, students were more likely to be doing something musical. 

    • This makes sense - when we model, often we’re doing a simultaneous imitation activity or an echo imitation activity 

Boler notes:  
Teachers gave low amounts of social approval. However, the teachers who did include higher amounts of social approval were the same ones who gave higher amounts of creative time. What does this mean to us, given what we know about social and emotional learning, and how that’s connected to creative tasks? Difficult to say with this sample size. 

Perceptions of Time Spent in Teacher Talk: A Comparison Among Self-Estimates, Peer Estimates, and Actual Time

  • Journal of Research in Music Education

  • Nápoles & Vázquez-Ramos (2013)

  • The study 

    • 32 choir teachers taught a choir rehearsal which was videoed, then estimated the amount of time they spent talking.

    • The videos were analyzed for the amount of time spent talking

    • Participants watched the videos with a stopwatch and tracked their own time, then compared it with their earlier estimates 

    • The teachers did the same process a second time, leading a videoed rehearsal, estimating their time, and going back to time it.

  • The results 

    • In the second rehearsal, teachers cut the amount of time they spent talking in half. 

    • We can’t say it lead to more effective teaching because the study didn’t track that. 

    • Awareness and self-monitoring seems to be an effective strategy to decreasing the amount of teacher talk 

Time Use in Instrumental Rehearsals: A Comparison of Experienced, Novice, and Student Teachers

________________________________________________________________________________

Framing the study 

  • It makes sense for us to talk to give directions. To an extent, there will always be teacher talking if the teacher has the physical ability to talk 

  • It may also make sense for creative tasks to be used less often than strictly performance tasks like singing or moving.

Quick Wins: 

  • If you can model it instead of speaking, choose to model. 

  • Write directions instead of repeating the same thing over and over 

  • Establish routines 

  • Point out positive behavior 

  • Ask a student to lead, explain, or demonstrate 

  • Think through the teaching process before you stand in front of students

Espresso Shot: Layered Ostinati and Engine Engine Number Nine

 
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This is a quick “espresso shot” episode. My hope is that it’s an actionable teaching idea that applies some larger principles, and gives you some inspiration on your drive to work. For my part, it keeps me thinking through many ideas and connections so I stay energized as well.

Main Rhyme:

Engine engine number nine going down Chicago line

See it sparkle, see it shine, engine engine number nine

Ostinato 1:

Clack clack clickity clack

Ostinato 2:

Cling clang

Pedagogical Use:

  • Rhythm vs Beat

  • Quarter rest

Wednesday Espresso: Engine Engine Number Nine & Partwork

 
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In a previous

Previous knowledge and skills:

  • Before this activity, students would have cognitive knowledge of steady beat, rhythm, and rhythm vs beat. They would have plenty of experience speaking, singing, playing instruments, moving to, improvising, arranging, listening, and aurally identifying these concepts in other songs. They’d also be familiar with the rhyme, Engine Engine, as well as the scaffolded version of the activity where the teacher is the only train leader.

Process:

  • Students sit on one side of the room and decide if they’ll speak the rhyme on text while patting the steady beat (option 1) or speak the rhyme on ta and ta-di while clapping the long and short sounds of the words (option 2). In other words, students choose if they’ll perform the rhythm or the beat.

    • This is an assessment that we would expect students to pass at this point.

    • Recruiting Interest / Optimize individual choice and autonomy

  • This time, all students are at the station waiting for a train. They’ll clap the rhythm and speak on ta and ta-di.

  • The teacher is the conductor and moves a train of four students around the room stepping a steady beat while the students at the station clap the rhythm. The teacher drops off passengers when the rhyme is over. Each passenger chooses their replacement and we speak the rhyme again.

  • Eventually transition to a student conductor and multiple trains moving around the room when students are ready.

  • In a later class, choose a station master to play the steady beat on UPP, and a ticket master to play the rhythm on rhythm sticks.

Tuesday Espresso: Multiple Means of Engagement, Partwork, Frog in the Meadow

 
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This is a quick “espresso shot” episode. My hope is that it’s an actionable teaching idea that applies some larger principles, and gives you some inspiration on your drive to work. For my part, it keeps me thinking through many ideas and connections so I stay energized as well.

Frog in the Meadow

Game:

  • Players form a circle with one student chosen to be a "frog" crouched in the center.

  • Players sing and circle around the "frog" while pointing with index fingers.

  • Players in the circle close their eyes and inner hear the song one time through

  • While circle has their eyes closed, the "frog" runs away and hides

  • After students are done inner hearing the song, they search for the "frog." The finder becomes the next "frog" and the game begins again.

Multiple Means of Engagement & Partwork:

  • Sing the song and play the game

    • Recruiting interest / Optimize relevance, value, and authenticity

  • In small groups, students create jumping motions that match the lower vocal part

    • Sustaining Effort & Persistence / Foster collaboration and community

  • Students check to see if their motions match the length of the lower vocal part

    • Self Regulation / Develop self-assessment and reflection

  • Students sing the bass part on their own, without teacher assistance.

  • Students choose if their group will sing the bass part, or the main melody

    • Recruiting Interest / Optimize individual choice and autonomy

Singing Harmony in Elementary Music

 
 

What’s the best way to introduce singing harmony in elementary music? Also, what’s the most appropriate age? Thanks!

For our purposes, let’s divide harmony into a few different categories. Normally when people talk about harmony they mean parallel harmony.

I’ll answer this with an eye toward vocal harmony, because there’s another conversation we can have about performing in an Orff ensemble - things like types of borduns, rhythmic interest on the fifth, color parts, etc. I don’t want those to get confused so to articulate this clarification, we’re moving toward vocal harmony here.

Harmony: Two or more melodic parts performed at the same time

Very often, we can approach melody more intentionally by backing up and looking at rhythm first.

Texture

Rhythm vs beat

  • Important because all our other harmonic work will come down to the ensemble skill of staying together. This is the first partwork skill we use and we can start it around 1st grade.

  • Pat the steady beat and sing, play the rhythm on rhythm sticks and beat on tubano, step the beat and clap the words, play the melody on recorder while others play the beat with a chord bordun. (for our purposes I’ll include borduns here but there’s more of a conversation we could have about them)

  • When we start working on partwork in the early grades, parallel harmony is so much easier.

Ostinati

  • A repeating musical pattern

  • Rhythmic or melodic

  • Rhythmic first

  • Potentially around 1st grade, with increasing levels of complexity moving forward in other grades, especially in terms of melodic ostinati

    • I Love the Mountains (boomdiada)

    • Rocky Mountain

    • Who Has Seen the Wind?

Chord Roots

  • Great Big House

  • Potentially around 2nd or 3rd Grade, corresponding with tonic and dominant

By this point we have a collection of partwork skills we can use. Importantly, students aren’t being asked to interact with harmony (texture / partwork) for the very first time in 6th grade choir.

Partner songs & partner “fragment” songs

  • Yonder Come Day (arr. Judith Cook Tucker)

  • Weevily Wheat, Bow Wow Wow, Tideo partners

Rounds

  • Partner movement with

2-part Harmony & Parallel Harmony

  • This is a natural next step of the learning progression of texture.

Teaching a Partwork Piece on Barred Instruments

 
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I’ve always had trouble teaching a two part or more song to students and was wondering if you have any insight on how to do it successfully?

Blog Post: Scaffolding Mallet Instruction

Before the Lesson: Prep

Play all the parts yourself.

What feels tricky? What is the sticking you want students to use?

In the Moment: Teacher Demeanor

Keep your demeanor upbeat.

It can be frustrating to see students struggle with something you think should be easy. Take it as information from the students.

Ask the students: What about this is difficult for you? What should we do? What do you need from me? Students think their answer, discuss with a shoulder partner, and share out. Students are intuitive. We don’t need to solve everything for them all the time. We can help them identify challenges. This is a tie-in with universal design for learning, and with social and emotional learning (self-management). Sometimes we just need more practice.

Guidelines to Teaching Partwork

Every Student Learns Every Part

Music is for everyone - there aren’t special parts for special musicians or the strongest players. This helps partwork and listening skills as well.

What if you were a flute player and you knew what to listen for in the low brass line? How would that help the ensemble? How many times as a student did you hear the director say, “listen back” without clarifying what to listen for?

The Body is the First Instrument

This is why we play the parts ourselves before we teach it.

If we can do it off the instruments, we can play it on the instruments. Use speech and movement.

What is the purpose of the piece? What is the pedagogical goal? How can we use that understanding to help the performance?

Practice Partwork Off the Instruments

Vary the groupings and the independence required for each group to be successful. The smaller you make the groups, or the more distance you have between groups, the more partwork independence practice students will get.

Start with the whole class doing one part and you doing another. Gradually progress to three student groups.

Random Tips:

  • Keep your eyes up!

  • Turn the instrument.

Kindergarten Informance Ideas: The Carrot Seed

 
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Hey, Victoria! Your podcast on how to plan an informance was super helpful! I get the concept, but have hard time finding repertoire. Would you have any suggestions for a kindergarten informance around “The Carrot Seed” by Ruth Krauss? I’m collaborating with our kindergarten team on it… Some themes they cover through the book are patience, individuality, and growing. Thank you in advance! All your resources have been so helpful so far this year!

Performance vs Informance:

We could make a beautiful performance around The Carrot Seed. Students could still use all the musical ways they use in your regular teaching.

What are you Teaching?

Look at what students will have learned by the time the informance takes place.

https://victoriaboler.com/blog/elementary-music-informance-2

Informance Ideas: The Carrot Seed

Kindergarten Concepts:

  • Steady beat

  • High / low

  • Loud / quiet

  • Fast / slow

  • 4 voices

Kindergarten Skills:

  • Singing

  • Playing unpitched percussion / pitched percussion

  • Playing body percussion

  • Creative and structured movement

  • Reading and writing iconic notation

  • Improvising, Arranging, Composing

Book Theme, Song, Concept / Skill

  • This wouldn’t be my first choice for an informance because there isn’t a lot to work with thematically. The book is fabulous and magical, but there aren’t any new scenes to work with thematically.

  • Oats Peas Beans and Barley Grow - steady beat

  • John the Rabbit - call and response

  • The Green Grass Grew All Around - Echo singing

Musical and Thematic Concepts:

  • It takes so long to grow: do any song with a fast and slow tempo

  • The seed goes in the ground and comes up: do any song with a high and low voice or with pitched percussion

Compose a song, rhyme, or game

What is the goal? The goal is education, not entertainment.

Again, it’s tricky because the point isn’t to put on a performance. It’s to share what you’re already doing in the classroom. So for this specific purpose we want to avoid creating a song just to go with the book.

  • Little seed, little seed, let me watch you grow. Little seed, little seed why do you grow so slow?

  • Find a seed, put it in the ground. Pull the weeds from all around.

  • Splish splash, watering can, what a hard working gardener I am!

  • What will you plant in the garden? What will you plant this year? What will you plant in the garden? We would love to hear. s sl s sl s m, s ss l l s, s sl s sl s m, s f m r d.

    • How fantastical will we get?