The Blog

Working on song texts continued yesterday at JTPTrust Classes; youngest children explored ‘The Frog’ by Nina Perry (a tale in which pride really does ‘come before a fall) and Grade 3’s explored ‘The Dormouse’ by Elizabeth Poston, ( a sleepy dormouse awakened by an excitable lizard to visit the nativity scene).  Both songs offer different challenges;  but in both the Team Teachers led the singers towards channelling communication through facial expression via understanding and ownership of the text.

The children discovered, through performance of the song text, that sometimes the breath needs to happen at a different place in the sentence.

We also worked on ‘My favourite things’ from the Sound of Music. Children love putting movements to songs and we often begin by adding stylised movements to songs (eg tying a bow on ‘tied up with string’, and curtsying on ‘girls in white dresses’) these movements are simply ‘aid-memoirs’ to memorising the text.

It is important to be aware, however, that the above is just a first learning stage. Yesterday we returned to the text,  discussed the context of the song (ie Maria sings this to calm the frightened children in a Thunderstorm).

• We asked each child to describe to us her own ‘Favourite thing’,
• We observed that each child did not necessarily mime the word  as they told us
• We understood that the same would be true for Maria.
• We sang the song in pairs each child telling the text to the other child
• We changed partners each verse
• we observed the chromatic rise at the end of verse 3 to musically describe fear.
• We thought about the triumph of  the ‘favourite things’ over fear in the last verse

At the end of the lesson, we performed the song, imagining all our future audience were Maria’s children.