Surprise! It's another Halloween song, lol! This one I learned from Cindy McCaskill during my practicum with her at Mesa Elementary in Boulder, CO.
Here's the song:
I found a lot of fun manipulatives at Target this year. In the dollar section I found these black cat erasers:
What I'm going to do with them is have the kids, working in pairs, derive the rhythm of the first phrase on two beat strips. Of course I don't have the beat strips at home, so I will post a picture of how that will look that shortly. Each beat strip has four hearts (They are the same ones that I used in the
El Reloj de la Calavera post) so the first strip will have one cat eraser on each heart to represent ta. On the second beat strip, hearts #1 & 2 will have two cat erasers, heart #3 will have 1 eraser and heart #4 will have none. We are practicing
ta &
ti-ti and this will serve as practice of those rhythmic elements and it will serve as preparation for
quarter rest. After they have derived the sounds on the beats we will replace the erasers with notation cards for the known elements. What's nice about this song is that each phrase, rhythmically, is the same. So, using the beat strips they can practice reading this pattern four times while the song is sung.
With my second graders we will read the rhythm of the song from this chart (it's not used with first grade because we haven't presented
quarter rest yet):
We will also derive the form: rhythmically it's a-a-a-a but melodically it's a-a-b-c (or a-a-b-av). It's also fun to add instruments on the rests; I let the students pick which instruments they would like to play (their all time favorite to use is the vibraslap). We also sing the song while playing a half-note bordun of E-B on the bass xylophone and various rhythm instruments of your choice on the rhythm.
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