CHILDREN'S LITERATURE - BOOKS TO SING

STEADY BEAT - RHYTHM FLOWERS

March Winds - Mother Goose
March Winds
... April showers
Bring forth May flowers.

I stopped at the teacher store and found wonderful precut flower shapes and wrote basic rhythms on each flower - 1 beat per flower.  Once they were laminated, I put magnets on the back and invited children to create rhythm chaings with the flowers.

After sharing the story, I reread the story inviting children to recite our poem after each 2-page reading.  Then I invited children to gather at the pocket chart (I use a "webbing" pocket chart) to brainstorm names of flowers.  I asked the children to share one of their favorite flowers (or perhaps a flower they had heard in the story that they liked).  Each flower was written on a seperate precut flower shape and then added to the web activity.

When we had named about 12-16 flowers, I asked children to start grouping the flowers into those names that had 1 sound, 2 sounds, etc.  Then we took our rhythm block pattern - basically a rectangle with a dotted line drawn lightly in the middle from top to bottom - and wrote the names of each flower on each building block (one flower per block).  The we worked through the rhythms of each block to decide how to write the flower rhythm.

After reviewing our poem, I put children into groups of 4-5 and asked each group to create a 4-beat word chain with 4 of the flowers.  We created an AB piece of music by reciting the poem as our A Section, allowing each group to share their word chain as the B Section.  Using hand drums in the B Section created a wonderful way to engage the children these last few weeks of school.

Check back in a day or so and I should have my SMART file loaded as well -- I have the file of flowers already completed and ready for kids to interactively create the word chains using the SMART board.

CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE PRECUT FLOWER SHAPES - ON SALE!!!




CLICK THIS LINK TO PURCHASE PLANTING A RAINBOW

MELODY

STEADY BEAT