Stop, Look, Listen!
Our third grade musicians are learning about playing different musical parts in an ensemble. We began by learning a simple chant that teaches about street safety:
Stop!, Look!, Listen!
Before you cross the street
use your eyes, use your ears
and then use your feet!
Students repeated this chant several times while walking to the beat around the room as I played the steady beat on the temple blocks.
Next, they learned about ostinato. An ostinato is a repetitive musical figure that accompanies the main melody or rhythm. In this case, we learned about rhythmic ostinati (plural:) that accompanied our original chant (which is also a rhymic pattern)
The first ostinato they learned is below:
Ostinato 1:
Crosswalk
I'm in a crosswalk
Crosswalk
I'm in a crosswalk
Students were then broken into two groups-one that chanted the main chant and the other, the first ostinato. We continued layering ostinati until we had five different parts all going at once!
Here are the others:
Ostinato 2:
Wait, don't walk
Wait, don't walk
Ostinato 3:
Here comes the train
Look out!
Here comes the train
Look out!
Ostinato 4:
Woo-hoo!
Woo-hoo!
Students then transferred these parts onto untuned percussion instruments, including drums, guiros (scraping instrument), woodblocks, shekere's (gourd instrument from West Africa) and various other percussion instruments.
Finally, they were put into groups to work out their own arrangement of the piece. They could start and end any way they liked, They could incorporate movement. Here are two groups preparing their arrangements and performing for the class.
Enjoy!
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