December Singalong!

I, like many music teachers, do more than just teach classes and put on concerts. One of my favorite school events is an all-school pajama day singalong right before December break. I teach K-5, so it's a wide range of ages to appeal to, and a diverse student population. Because I have students who cannot participate in anything holiday related due to religious beliefs, I try to keep the singalong primarily winter based, but represent Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa with one song explicitly about each holiday. That way, students who want to can sing about the holiday they celebrate, or another holiday, but those who cannot are still able to be included on songs about snow, penguins, and other non-holiday related fun. Rather than sit and sing, we add lots of movements and other fun activities to keep everyone engaged. I've built a few new traditions in my 3 years so far at my school, and it's always amazing to see the kids remember songs they've learned in years past.

I can't share my slides for all of the songs due to copyrighted lyrics, but here's a list of what we'll be doing for our singalong this year:

• Jingle Bells
• Sleigh Ride (we use the Pentatonix version)
• Do You Want to Build a Snowman from Frozen
• I Have a Little Dreidel
• Penguin Polka from Music K-8 (we stand up and dance while singing this one)
• Kwanzaa is Here
• Fur Elise winter movements (from the Feierabend Move It DVD)
• Snow Day! Snow Day! Hip Hip Hooray by Sally Albrecht and Jay Althouse
• Frosty the Snowman
• Rudolph
• When the Lights All Shine from Music K-8 (SHINE is our school rules/character building acronym and we do sitting choreography to this one)

The Hills and Valleys of December

Teaching in December is:
a. exciting
b. exhausting
c. frustrating
d. all of the above

Today was a long Monday, and last week was one of the toughest weeks of teaching for me ever. Teaching in December is different from the rest of the year. Not worse, exactly, it's fun to see the kids excited and there's lots of cool events happening, but it's tiring. That hundredth time asking kids to quiet down isn't quite as gentle as the first time. The fifth time kids start randomly singing jingle bells in the middle of another song isn't as endearing as the first time. There's so much joy, so much energy, and so much to do in too little time. December is like a microcosm of the school year, with lots of highs and lows and sugar crashes and drinking too much coffee (or is that just me?).

The best moments, though, come at those times of exhaustion and frustration. I've been using the last few minutes of my music classes to work on songs for our December singalong. We do a big all-school pajama day before break, and I like to do a few non-traditional songs that require the kids to learn a bit of choreography and some short tunes. It's fun, no pressure, and gets us all dancing our way into break. And just when I'm about to remind a student about behavior for the tenth time, they'll perk up and join us in snow hands or "shine fingers" (yes, I renamed jazz hands) or some other silly movement. There's magic in all that energy, in having 20 kindergarteners shove peace signs as close to your face as they can from their seat because they're SO EXCITED about a song they're doing with the "big kids".

I'll be spending the next 9 school days looking for those magic moments, and surviving the frustrating times in between. And then I will take a very long, well deserved winter break nap.

Books in the Elementary Music Room: Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear? by Bill Martin Jr and Eric Carle

I love using books in my music classes! Picture books engage students in so many ways - visually hearing the story (sometimes with a song), seeing beautiful illustrations, and often acting out the story - that enrich their imaginations and help them create music. I'm planning to make a little series out of these posts, but today I'll be discussing Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear? by Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle.

This adorable little book is the sequel to the well-known Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by the same authors. Each page follows a question and answer format, leading the reader through bright, large illustrations of each animal mentioned. I've used it in general music classes for a few different concepts:

• Vocal exploration (making animal sounds from the book and discussing how they are similar/different)
• Musical phrases (musical "questions and answers")
• Ensemble skills (differentiating between a soloist singing the question and the group singing the answer, or different groups singing the question and answer)
• Sequencing (remembering the order of animals in the book, creating new possible orders of animals and figuring out which words need to change to make that happen)
• Introduction to instruments (two animals in the book are described as "fluting" and "trumpeting", which I used as a chance to demonstrate flute and trumpet)

I also used this book as part of our December Singalong assembly. I learned a simple melody that works with the words of the book from another teacher, and taught parts to all my students K-5. At the assembly, we were able to put the whole thing together and sing the book as a school, complete with student trumpet and flute players for those animals! It was a really nice way to have all the students cooperating towards a common goal and having a lot of fun roaring, hissing, and snarling their way into December break.