What a fun week! Thank you, parents, for coming and participating. The kids love it when you are here! Next week only students and homework comes…no bells or bags! If your child did ANY of the Christmas Break Challenge activities, please send it with them SIGNED, so they can get their prizes!

Here are a few classroom reminders…

1. Be on time: If a student is consistently late, they will miss important exercises that will affect their musical training. (The key word is consistent, we are all human with stuff that happens, so just try your very best.)
2. Add your energy to class: Make sure you are participating right alongside your child. I can’t do it all by myself. Well, maybe I could, but it’s much more fun if everyone is having fun with me!
3. Please let me know if you can’t see the Google class calendar. It lets you know when we don’t have class and when it is a Parent Day.
4. Tuition is due this week and is $280 for the Blue Bugs semester. You can pay via Zelle using my phone number (preferred, so I don’t have to pay Venmo transaction fees). Zelle is a way to transfer money from your bank account to my bank account without needing to wait or pay extra fees. It’s easy to set up through your bank and even easier to use once it has been set up. You could pay via Venmo @musikandme if you really can’t set up Zelle. If you need to make monthly payments, rather than paying for the semester, it will be $75/month. (You will save $20 by paying for the semester up front!)

New Melodic Pattern
Today we learned ‘sol la ti do’ hand signs and notated them on the staff (baby steps going up)! We’ll be hearing, singing and signing this pattern a lot now. Remember singing our cadence patterns over and over again help us to sing in tune and aurally internalize the diatonic scale.

New Songs
Many new songs were introduced today. Within the next few weeks we’ll be learning complex skills and concepts from these songs. Things like: identifying rhythms and how to notate them, subdividing a beat, harmony using a round, recognizing a broken chord, playing and reading skips on the staff, and SO much more!

Our new songs from today included: Clickety, Clickety Clack, Can’t Bug Me, Old Paint, Rig-a-Jig-Jig, Johnny’s Haircut, How to Skip, and our new puppet show, Triumphant March. Every activity has a music lesson hidden inside and the exciting part is your student just thinks we are just PLAYING!! It’s magical! (But it works best if they already know the songs before they come to class!)

The Staff

In our homework we’re reviewing hand signs. For extra fun staff practice at home, create the major scale and sign each note as you build the scale. Click here for our dry erase student magnet board and 1st year magnet set to create your own balloons, scale, or footprints on the staff.

Have fun with reading this blog post on Old Paint! (Lots of extra fun here, so definitely check it out if your child needs more to do!)

Here is a quick chord matching game that I created on my website to help remember which solfege goes to which colored triangle! Here’s also a solfege hand sign matching game!

Also, I’ve added the Triumphant March puppets here for you! Enjoy coloring together and making your own puppets! (Don’t forget to listen to the music while coloring!) If you’d like to laminate them, I can laminate them for you and it only costs just barely more than the cost of the laminating sheets.

Have a musical day!
-Ms. Bethany 🙂