Week 7: 9/27-10/1

We began a 5-week Music Unit this week, 9/27-10/29. After reviewing norms and routines in the Music Room, we resumed our normal class structure of: Singing (Vocal Warm-Up, Melodic Musicianship Training and learning new repertoire) and instrumental ensemble playing. We reviewed the chorus of “Home” by Phillip Phillips and began singing “Lean on Me”. We resumed working with the pitched percussion instruments (xylophones, metallophones, glockenspiels and marimbas), where we are working to play the melody of “Home” and “Lean on Me”, as well as developing basic harmonic accompaniments for those same songs. We sang letter names of pitches and are developing the ability to hear the position of a melody within a scale. We started to explore scales as the basic way that pitch is organized within Western music, which leads to the creation of triads that create harmony. We are working with short segments of popular music, but will soon begin working on a specific arrangement that we could perform later in the year.