Great first week at Roscomare

What I great week I had! We had chance to try out the new Orff Instrumentarium with fifth grade, had lots of fun developing music and movement pieces around tongue twisters in third and fourth, and played around with a bunch of a singing, moving and playing ideas in the other grades. Along the way everybody went out of their way to make me feel welcome, and I could not be happier to have landed here. This week we will be adding the after school music ensembles -- Found Sound Story Theater on Mondays and Chorus on Tuesday. I was sorry to say that we did not get the minimum we needed to do world music ensemble made up of the Orff instruments seen here. But I am hopeful that by the time the time new after school class cycle resets in November, enough of you will have gotten hooked on what these wonderful instruments can do.

Recorder-like instruments are among the world's oldest!

Third graders take note -- the recorders we will be getting are descended from bone flutes like this one, discovered in caves in Europe that were inhabited during the ice age -- 40,000 years ago. Another way of looking at this is that people have been playing hot cross buns since before hot cross buns were invented!

Crickets and Chorus?

I wanted to share this very cool audio track by Jim Wilson. What you are listening to is a recording of crickets and the same recording slowed wwwwwaaaaaayyyyy down. Sounds like a human chorus, doesn't it? One the things I want to encourage you do is to try to think about familiar things, especially musical things, in new ways. It is those kinds of connections that lead to the deepest understanding, whether the subject be music or art or math or whatever. By the way -- we will have a chorus this year after school on Tuesday for interested 3rd, 4th and 5th graders.

Greetings Roadrunners!

Hello Roscomare Roadrunners and Friends. My name is Richard Lawton, and I will be your music teacher this year. I am thrilled to be here, and I am looking forward to a great year in music. I will be using this blog from time to time to share images and videos, information and instructional material, so please bookmark the address. When I tell you in class that I am "putting it on the blog," this is what I am talking about -- so check back often!