Milwaukee's Florentine Opera company puts on an opera for kids each year. An opera is a story told on stage with singing. 

Our prayer song for the month was "10,000 Reasons (Bless the Lord)."

In December, we put the finishing touches on our Christmas Concert music. The students did so well at the concert! They really seemed to love both of their songs. It was so much fun to work with them on learning the songs. We watched our Christmas Concert videos during class.

After our concert, we learned about The Nutcracker ballet. We learned that a ballet is a story told on stage through dance and music. We did activities with the pieces "Trepak" and "The Sugar Plum Fairy."

Students have been focusing mainly on their Christmas Concert songs. We focus on learning the words to the song and accompanying movements, of course, but we also learn about the historical background of each of our songs. Students explain what they remember about the history of their concert songs on a worksheet, and I pick a few of the best writings to be read at the concert.

Our "prayer song" for the month was "My Country, Tis of Thee."

We finished our unit on the melody notes so, la, and mi. We practiced writing these notes on the music staff. We also played them with the Boomwhackers. A song that we used to work on these notes was "We Are Dancing in the Forest," which has a fun freeze dance game to go with it!

Our prayer song for the month was "Hail Mary: Gentle Woman."

We also learned the song "Autumn Is Here" by a music teacher on YouTube named Mr. DelGaudio. It has fun movements and instruments that go with each part of the song!

We started off the year reviewing the notes "so" and "mi" from 2nd grade. We sang songs with these notes, listened for patterns using the notes, practiced writing the notes on the music staff, and composed with the notes. Students took a quiz on the so and mi notes.

We also discussed why composers might choose to use high or low notes in their melodies. We used two pieces from Camille Saint-Saëns's Carnival of the Animals to discuss why composers make these decisions. Those pieces were "Aviary" and "Elephant."

Our prayer song for the month was "We Are One Body," which is our school's theme song for the year.