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.