Observation Reflection #9

I observed Mrs. Collette Tanner's 5th grade choir class today at Our Lady Queen of Heaven Catholic School, and the experience was both extremely different and enlightening. The class was a choir class, so despite the fact that the children were in 5th grade, the class was mostly performance based, and this was a huge transition for me. The first thing the class did was a quick review on a music history test that is to be taken presumably soon. When the class moved onto singing, they started with vocal warm-ups that focused on preparing the children for the singing in which they would be involved for the next hour. Their warm-ups were multi-faceted, including pentatonic scales for practice with pitch recognition and accuracy, while also involving articulations to help the children with vowel pronunciation. A large portion of the class was spent working on these warm-ups, both in warming the children's voices up and in an effort to commit these basic practices to memory. After the class finished warm-ups, they moved onto their first song of the class, 'Doraji.' This is a Korean folk song based solely around an extended do pentatonic scale, and Mrs. Tanner worked with the children on this concept. After the class sang the song a few times, Mrs. Tanner directed them to the board where she notated the different pitches present in the folk song, and the children took pride in helping her place the notes as they are supposed to go on the staff. They are already very familiar with note interrelationships, and she had them sing the pentatonic scale as practice in ...