Visit #5 and #6: It's Christmas Time!

Hello, everyone!

These past two weeks, I had a wonderful time visiting the kids! They have been learning all about Christmas in France and so when I came in last week, I taught them to sing Silent Night in French.  They memorized the words very quickly and were patient enough to sit still while I taught them all about dynamics! We learned all about how pairing certain words with dynamic stress can increase their meaning and how that can positively affect an audience. I brought my guitar and was able to accompany them while they sang, which was absolutely great!
This week, I came in and taught them another more traditional French Christmas song called Le Père Noël. It's all about how Santa is sick on the day before Christmas eve and needs to get better before he wakes up to deliver presents! There are percussion-style coughs, sneezes, and shushing sounds throughout the three verses of the music and so I taught the students about the effect non-musical sounds can have on a piece and on the audience that hears it. Since this song is generally only sung in France, I had some trouble finding a suitable accompaniment for it and so I took the melody line and made my own accompaniment for piano. I'll post the link to the music where you can see it and listen to the accompaniment if you would like! Another exciting thing we got to do this week is play on two full sets of xylophone hand bells! I borrowed these sets from the Brigham Young University Elementary Music Department and the class was able to learn about chords and how to play them! I split the class into two groups and each group was in charge of a chord. Luckily Le Père Noël only has two chords in the whole song so the class was able to accompany themselves, which they seemed to really enjoy. As a bonus, we were able to add this song to the annual Christmas Concert! I'm working on getting a video from it so I can post it on here for everyone to enjoy! Fingers crossed!

https://my.scorecloud.com/song/e6c823f0b4138b562f30ebc82bd36fee/Le-Pere-Noel-Est-Enhrume

This is the link to my accompaniment transcription!

This is a picture of one of the handbell sets that we had. I passed out only f,a,c,e, and g so that we had two chords.

Visit #4: All About Ogres!

Hello everyone!

We finished up our segment on area and perimeter and the next subject is literacy! Every week, the students read a new French story and this week the story is all about an Ogre! We really wanted to give the students a chance to expand their minds a little about ogres before they read the story. Since the children are learning a whole new language, it's best for them if they understand the concept of an English word before they have to learn it in French. This means that we needed an activity that was all about ogres so the students could become more familiar with them! Needless to say, this was a very exciting week, but it was also kind of difficult to find an aspect of the arts that was based on ogres. I couldn't find a song about ogres that was short enough for them to learn in one session, and so I spent some time making one up for them! They seemed to really have a ton of fun with it, and I was so glad to see they were excited about what they were learning. For the musical aspect of it, I taught the students how to use actions with a song to make it more interesting for an audience. They REALLY got into it and I got a ton of students wanting to stand up with me in front of the class and show everyone the actions they had come up with to dramatize the song. Here's a short video that I think you're really going to enjoy of the class practicing the song!