*Week 10*

This week one of the first concepts we worked on was Binary. We actually began working on this concept last week when we did a dancing activity with the song Hit the Road Jack, but we expanded on it much more this week. The concept of Binary is that a song can be broken into two distinct sections, A. which is the chorus or refain, of B. which is the verse. The chorus is what gets repeated over and over again, and can be seen quite often in pop music. On Monday we did an activity to go over Binary form with a song about a butterfly. We made two circles that moved in opposite directions and when it was the verse we just skipped around the circle, but once it got to the actual chorus we did a butterfly motion. It was a good way to help us remember Binary form.
Also, this week we did several other activities focused towards the children's literature project. Last week we focused on how music enhances creativity in literature, but this week we focused on how music and literature can be used to teach other subjects as well, such as social skills, social studies, science, and math. The first activity we did was with the chicken little story. This was really great because it encorporated a ton of the classroom instruments. Usually we will use some of the basic instruments, but for this song we used just about everything. It was awesome to hear everything come together. Our class actually sounded like an musicians, so it shows that you can teach children who do not usually play instruments a few simple things to do, but when you combine it all together it makes something really great. Not only does this help the literature lesson, but it also enhances teamwork.
On Wednesday we also read a book called Thunder cake. We were asked to all bring some sort of recycable trash with us back to class on Friday. Most people brought back things like waterbottles, pop cans, cerial boxes, or things of that nature. We were divided into groups based on numbers and given sounds that we had to come up with using our recycled garbage as our instruments. This is a great idea because in our classrooms chances our we will not have fancy instruments like we had used on Wednesday, so this is a much more realistic lesson plan for us. It also gave us an opportunity to be creative, which we said was important. This book was excellent to use though because it taught several others concepts, such as science, home economics, social skills, social studies, importance of recycling, math, and a few other things. It was great how many different concepts it taught, so it showed us that using one book we can teach a multitude of different things.