myGanBlog: Listen to the music

A look at this week:

We continued learning about Purim this week by focusing on music and happy celebration! The children were amazed with the musical items brought into the classroom. They were able to go over to the little mini grand piano and play some music, make shakers and more! We started out by talking about the seven basic letters used in music, focusing our week on the letters A,B,C,D,E,F and G. We made sure we could recognize these letters and even did a music letter train by putting the letters in a repetitious order. While playing the piano, the children were able to put letter blocks into the order they wanted to play and then they found the corresponding letter on the keys of the piano. In home living this week we pretended that we were part of a band, making music at a celebration by playing the maracas and the tambourine! In art this week we made our own music by using staff paper and adding notes to it. As a science project, we used plastic eggs of different sizes and filled them with items, such as rice, corn, pasta and bells and then listened to hear which eggs sounded louder and which sounded softer. We also learned that the pasta could fit into all the eggs (big or small). We had felt notes that could be put onto the felt box and then they could read the notes the way we have learned to read them in our music class on Fridays. We also had a musical instrument memory game and had the chance to write about what different musical instruments sound like.

The children also enjoyed making their own instruments and noise makers. We made tambourines with pie pans and bells and we made groggers (noise makers for Purim) out of cups and corn kernels or rice and also out of paper plates and beans.

Listening in to the conversation:

The best conversation of the week took place on Wednesday when Jayden saw the piano.

Jayden: Does this really work?

Morah Tzivie: I am sure you will find out when you come back in here.

Jayden walked over to the piano and hit a few keys.

Jayden: Look! It really works!

Later in the day, Jayden was still amazed by the piano really working!

Looking forward to next week:

We will be spending one more week on Purim. This week we will be continuing our conversation about patterns and we weave baskets and talk about Shalach Manot (the gifts of food that are given on Purim). We will also be making different foods out of playdough, revisiting our raisin experiment to see what has happened to our grapes and having our own Purim celebration in the classroom on Wednesday!