Tuesday, March 4, 2025 | Blue Bugs Lessons

Lesson #9

Thank you, parents, for coming to class! We enjoy having you here and bonding with your child. What a gift you are giving them!

SPIRIT WEEK IS UNDERWAY! Let me know if you need any substitutions for any of the squares. The BINGO card is in the Student Portal, if you lose yours and need to make a copy! As a reminder, some of the drawing prizes are some instruments and an MP3 player that you can put your class music on! 

One of the items on the BINGO card is to leave a Google review. I'm striving for a 5 star rating. If you don't plan to give me 5 stars, please talk to me BEFORE you post a review so I can address any issues you may have. Unfortunately, negative feedback has much more impact than positive feedback does, so please give me the chance to earn 5 stars if I'm not already there. Thanks! Here is the link to post a review on Google: https://g.page/musikandmebethany/review?gm

Registration is now open for current students! Please go to https://www.musikandme.com/Registration for instructions of how to enroll your student and purchase their 2nd year materials. There is a $20 registration fee, but you won't need to pay it if you register by March 28th! (You can earn 20 extra tickets by registering by March 15th!) My 2nd Year class will be Tuesdays at 5:30pm. I can possibly adjust this if necessary, but please register as soon as you can.

Tuition is due this week if you are making payments. Thank you!

On Top of Spaghetti
Learning to hear chord progressions as well as each part of a chord is a vital skill when becoming a musician. This song and activity is very rich in it's musical lessons. We play the autoharp which allows us to have our hands doing two different things, and our eyes are looking at the chord map and reading music. We are hearing the chord progressions and then we sing each piece of the chord as each student points to their triangles. It's so fun!      
      
Drunken Sailor
This folk song is a famous sea-shanty, a song which sailors sang while they worked. They sang to keep the beat as they worked together. Our dance teaches the children to feel and recognize musical form, which is the repetition, balance, phrasing, and construction of a song. You hear a theme that repeats a few times and we do the same dance movement back and forth. Then at the end of the phrase "...early in the morning" you hear a strong cadence pull to DO. A cadence is found at the end of a musical phrase. This cadence has a strong pull to our ears that indicates the musical sentence has finished. This cadence trains the ear how music sounds when it is complete or finished: it feels like we have come back home.  

Fox Hunt - NEW puppet show!
New puppet show! This fun song teaches us to identify rhythmic patterns and learn about classical form. Classical form is when you identify the reoccurring melodic themes and label them. Understanding this concept will help your student in 3rd year to compose their own music! I've attached the new puppets as well as put them in the student download portal!

Jungle Rhythms - spatial skills
As your child sees how the Jungle Rhythm chart divides space and hear how the music divides time, they become aware of how the two correlate. This develops their spatial awareness. 
Subdividing rhythms: abstract notation
Seeing the Jungle Rhythm chart exposes children to what the written form of subdividing looks like.

Can't Bug Me
This week in class we clapped bug rhythms without seeing the bug cards. That’s right! We clapped our rhythms today only using the ‘real’ music notation, without the help of our musical bugs. They’re smart little cookies!

Our new puppet show was written by Gioachino Antonio Rossini, who was born on February 29 (leap year!), 1792 in Italy to a family of musicians. His father played the horn and his mother was a singer. He was just six years old when he joined his father’s band – he played the triangle. When he was only 10 years old, he was asked often to play the piano and sing at their church. At that age, he began composing and soon became the most celebrated composer of Italian Opera. Our puppet show, “The Fox Hunt” is from the William Tell Overture. This famous piece has been imitated (top video) and heard in various "rock-n-roll" forms (bottom video) all over the world!
      
 
     

Here is a link to all the skills videos as well as the link to be able to purchase a class video to make up for a missed class. (tap or scan)

Have a musical day!
-Ms. Bethany :)