The end of the school year that is!
Not that we’re counting down the days but this week I have my FINAL class of the school year!!
This has been a rough year, I’m not gonna lie. Between a couple difficult classes and a lot of personal changes, struggles, and trials, I have never been more ready for the school year to end. But we can rejoice because we’ve made it!
There are definitely more challenges ahead but at least we get a small respite. And despite the struggles I have experienced over this last year, there were some good things too.
I started my own TPT store! Woohoo! I learned a TON more than I ever wanted to know about social media marketing, email campaigns, Powerpoint, and Canva! I’ve been pushed to what I thought was my limit and found out I was capable of more. And I’ve been able to create some amazing products to share with other teachers. To think of other teachers using MY resources in their classroom…its humbling and awesome at the same time.
So what awesome, amazing thing am I doing to wrap up the school year in my music classes??
In the last few weeks of school, we had Ice Cream and Pie Day, Pirate and Dragon Day, Game Day, and our all-time classic favorite: Donkey Konga Day!
I already shared about ice cream and pie in my last blog post. For Pirate and Dragon Day (‘cuz pirates and dragons go together, right?!), we sing some pirate songs while incorporating some folk dancing, we use some YouTube videos to play boomwhackers, do body percussion, and practice rhythms, and we read the book Dragons Love Tacos while singing and adding instruments!
Here are some of the videos I use from YouTube:
*Over the Deep Blue Sea : we literally just do the movements the song says and pat to the beat when it doesn’t give a specific movement
*The Wellerman for Kids : Incidentally this is the only version of this song I have found that does NOT mention rum. I have the students form a circle and establish partners within the circle.
For the first 8 beats, they hold hands and walk around the circle in one direction. When the songs says, “the winds came up” they raise their arms up high while still holding hands, and when the song says, “the rains came down” they swing their arms down low. Then let go of hands, and when it says, “thunder gave a clap” they clap! For the “soon may the pirates come,” they face their partner, clap their partners hands, clap their own hands, pat knees, clap their own hands, and repeat that whole sequence. For “stomp your feet and beat the drum” they stomp their feet twice, if you have drums you can lay out inside the circle they can beat the drum twice or just have them do some other movement like clap or pat. And then they can say “roar” really loud at the end. Then the whole song and dance repeats! Simple for a variety of age groups!
*Pirates vs Sea Monsters : fun rhythm play along! Break class into 2 groups and hand out some boomwahckers or other instruments!
*Pirates of the Caribbean: great for older students to learn about chords and chord symbols. But you can also use it with younger kids and just have them play the chord name letter (like A, F, C, etc.).
For the dragon part of the day, I use the book Dragons Love Tacos. A cute little book where you can add a song that repeats periodically throughout and you can add certain instruments when certain words repeat, like play maracas every time you hear the word “salsa”!
Game Day I literally just pull out a bunch of music games we have used throughout the school year and lay them out in a “centers” format. And we just have fun!
Then there’s Donkey Konga. So this is an old Nintendo Game Cube game (yes, Game Cube, its that old!) that I found on clearance years ago and snapped up as many bongos to go with it as I could. I knew when I saw it, it was going to be music class gold! I have used it as my last-day-of-music-activity for probably 10-15? years now and the kids LOVE it!
They ask me for it periodically but they all know its only for the last day of music. First, that makes it more special. And second, its really, really, loud and I don’t want to anger the other teachers in my school! But it plays music and the kids have to hit the correct bongo and just the right time. It only allows 4 players at a time though so I break them up into teams and they rotate playing. While they are not playing the game, they can work on coloring pages or word searches and other fun worksheets like that.
I’ll still be busy over the summer creating more resources for the classroom and of course, my school goes year-round so I’ll be back at it in July, so stick around for more fun. But that’s a wrap for 2023-2024 school year!
Miss Donna 4 Music 