As part of our snapshot, we recapped a song called ‘Tongo’. We warmed our voices up using an activity called ‘Plasticine Person’ We then practised performing the song using a call-and-response technique. Once we had mastered the structure, we added in a drone using the note D on a glockenspiel alongside our singing.
To finish our work on ‘Dawn’, we created a movement picture representing each of the musical ideas we had identified in previous lessons. We split into groups and each group had a different role to create a large image to accompany the piece of music.
We used the actions we had created in earlier lessons, as well as adding in a piece of fabric to represent the large ocean waves. Each group moved around and had a turn at each musical idea, only showing their actions if they could hear their specific instruments being played, we also used the listening map to help us identify the different sections.
We started our lesson again with our pitch pencils warm-up and this time we went BIG with some of our magical noisy pictures!
After we recapped our composer, we talked about what we had worked on in our previous lesson. We remembered that our piece of music was called ‘Dawn’ and that it used different instruments to create different sounding music for sea birds, ocean spray and ocean waves. We listened to the piece, adding actions for each of the musical ideas.
We then thought about signals and actions for things you might do at the beach. We had to listen carefully as Miss McGlone played different instruments and we had to recognise the action that matched the instrument.
We finished off the lesson by learning an action song called ‘Down by the bay’.
We began by warming up our voices using our ‘pitch pencils’. Pitch pencils draw magical noisy pictures in the air. When the pitch pencils move up and down, your voice does too! We copied Miss McGlone’s picture before having a go at creating our own.
We were then introduced to our new focus piece of music – ‘Dawn’ by Benjamin Britten. We discussed that Benjamin was an English composer and he lived in a small seaside town called Aldeburgh. He liked to walk by the sea every morning and lots of the music he wrote was inspired by the sea, just like the piece we are working on!
We listened to a performance of the piece by the London Symphony Orchestra and discussed how the piece made us feel. We then talked about how different instruments were used to create different representations of different musical ideas – the sound of sea birds, ocean spray and big crashing waves. We decided on actions that we could use to show each of these musical ideas and when listening to the piece again, we changed our actions depending on what we could hear being represented. We then noticed that at times, the ideas were performed at the same time so we had to make the decision which one we wanted to represent using our actions. We looked at a listening map to see the structure of the music.
Following on from our previous lesson, we began by practising our call-and-response warm-up ‘Water’, using a range of different notations and actions to go alongside them. We then looked at a short chant called ‘Blue flowing river water’ and discussed the rhythm. We then listened once again to our focus piece ‘Orawa’ and thought about the rhythm we had followed for ‘Blue flowing river water’. We talked about how we could use the same rhythm to create a chant about the journey of the river through the landscape. As a class, we identified seven key things that would be seen as the river travels and we created a short chant about each thing to the rhythm from our warm up.
Once we had perfected the lyrics for the chants and made sure that they fit with the rhythm, we practised as a class making sure we were clapping the correct rhythm as we were chanting.
We continued looking at examples of call-and-response pieces by learning a new warm-up called ‘Water’. During this warm up we used a semibreve, minims, crotchets and quavers to represent the words within the call-and-response warm-up.
We then built on this by adding in actions to go alongside each of the words.
Once we had warmed up, we discussed a river – how it flowed, what it might see as it makes the journey from the source. As a class we decided key things that would be seen on the journey.
Our new piece of focus music is called ‘Orawa’ (pronounced Arva). It is a piece of music written in 1986 by Wojciech Kilar. Orawa is a river that flows through Slovakia and Poland. The piece describes the river making the journey across Europe and whilst we were listening to it, we discussed how certain aspects of the music might represent some of the key things we had previously listed when thinking about a river’s journey (mountains, trees and villages).
Crew MW have had a lovely week exploring all things Easter! We’ve talked about the Christian celebrations for easter and the story behind this, we’ve looked at how plants grow and change and how during the spring time, lots of new baby animals are born such as chicks and lambs! We’ve really enjoyed exploring spring and Easter in our adult led lessons and during provision.
Our Easter celebrations continued throughout the week with our Easter bonnet parade on Wednesday! Once we had shown off all of our fantastic bonnets, we worked as a crew to vote for our favourites. Take a look at our fantastic creations…
Finally, we ended the half term with a visit from the Easter Bunny! He’d left lots of clues around school for an Easter egg hunt! We worked really hard as a crew to find the clues and to answer them. The last thing to do this half term was to celebrate Miss McGlone’s Birthday! Happy Birthday Miss McGlone! What a busy half term it has been!
I loved finishing the term with our acro and cheerleading showcase. It was amazing seeing the children show off their routines they have been practising. I know some of the children were nervous but I left feeling so proud of them all and it was lovely to see how proud they were too!
In our Crew this morning, we shared our feelings and started to learn about how to keep our minds healthy. We unpicked what the word ‘mental’ means and then discussed ‘mental well-being’. After a crew conversation around what we all enjoy doing, we completed a yoga task to start our day off calmly and positive.
During our debrief, we reflected on what we had learned about why it is important to look after ourselves.
Summer, ‘It is important to keep mentally healthy so that you can be positive.’
Levi, ‘If you have a good mental health you can think better and clearer.’
Lydia, ‘It’s important to look after ourselves to live a happy and healthy life.’
Shelby, ‘The yoga was calming and can help you let out any stresses. You can do this at home too.’
Joshua, ‘I am going to try and make sure I sleep for longer to be healthier.’