Green Turtles #11

NEED TO KNOW

Green Turtles #11: Parents, your Green Turtles are fantastic! I'm so proud of their hard work and how they are doing hard things!

BLUE CHORD: We officially introduced how to play the Blue Chord with the right hand. Ah-mazing! They did a great job with "Do has the thumb and the others go up one." Blue Chord is played with 1-3-5, the same fingers that play the Red Chord. It is time to put blue stickers on the keyboard and/or color your Chord Helper with blue! Here are some pictures to make sure you get it right the first time.

SONGBOOK MARKING: More coloring chords to help us see the differences! Here are the two songs we colored this week. If your student wasn't there or didn't finish or didn't have a songbook, update your books! (I actually didn't get to the Primary Chords song in one of the classes, so you can have them do that one during an at-home play.)

GOOD TO KNOW

TURTLE SHELLS: We continue to find intervals both on the staff, on the keyboard, and in our chords. The skill of seeing intervals will help to becoming a great sight reader!

ECHO EDNA: A good musician knows what a song sounds like after he plays it. A great musician can figure out what it sounds like before. Echo Edna gives the students practice in looking at a group of notes and figuring it out with the steps and the skips, singing it, then playing it. 

FUN TO KNOW

Aaron Copland, the composer of our Hoedown puppet show, was an American composer born in Brooklyn, New York in 1900, and was amazingly influential in creating American classical music. Many musicians of this time were dismissing traditional American music (including jazz, blues, and hoedown) as less important music. Copland not only embraced and highlighted American music, but showed how it belongs in the world music library. Last week I shared a blogpost with lots of information on Copland. Here is a video of Aaron Copland himself conducting Hoedown. He is so fantastic!