Cinderella music

Playing catch up

Daddy surprised the girls with a trip to Schlitterbahn (the best waterpark ever) so we are 2 days behind.  I'm sure I'm being a bit crazy but I planned a 12 week program and darn-it, we are going to do every lesson!

We might be rag muffins who don't brush our hair, but it's summer.

This has to be one of the perks to homeschool.

We started as we always do and then moved on to a new activity that I put together late last night.

I made sets of these cards for the girls, enough keys to make the size of a real piano.  I asked them to point out the difference between the sets of cards.  Then I had them lay them out in the same pattern as they see on their keyboard.  Once they were all laid out I told them this was the size of a real piano.

Then I asked them if they remembered where the C key was.

Look for the 2 black keys and then walk down the stairs.

I had them lay paper clips on every C they could find.

After we put this activity away we warmed up our fingers by doing the finger song.

Then we listened to our CD to hear what our friends Beethoven and Mozart were up too.  Each one had composed a song.  Beethoven Bear loves the low notes so his song was played on our left hand with the low notes and Mozart Mouse loves the high notes so his song was played with our right hand.

Estee got hold of the camera while I helped Coppelia first.

and she got a blurry picture of both of us... of course I'll treasure it.

After the keyboard part of our lesson we moved on to a Cinderella music activity.

What was the fairy Godmothers one request of Cinderella?

To be home by midnight, because at midnight everything would turn back to the way it was.

Here is a picture of a grandfather clock.  The pendulum on the clock has to keep a study beat

tick, tock, tick, tock...

What happens if that beat slows down?  The clock wont have the right time.

It was very important to Cinderella that the clock had the right time so the magic wouldn't disappear.

I made each of the girls clocks (minus the hands)

We played our rhythm sticks along with the song Hickory Dickory Dock.

In the first 3 measures of the song we have the 12 beats.

Hickory Dickory Dock, (1, 2, 3, 4)

The mouse ran up the clock, (5, 6, 7, 8)

The clock struck one, the mouse ran down... (9, 10, 11, 12)

(we held our rhythm sticks up for the next 4 counts and nervously said "Did she make it")

Hickory Dickory Dock ("she did!" so we celebrate with 4 more taps)

This is were we concluded our lesson but we did spend another 20 or so minutes working on our singing. We used Easy Disney favorites.  

It's a book of music for the viola with a play-along CD with complete rhythm section accompaniment.  We aren't teaching ourselves how to play the viola but the accompaniment CD is working great with the girls as they use their ears for musical cues and learn to sing these framilar songs with accompaniment.