If you're looking for a fresh way to practice rhythms - be it through reading, performing or composition - then why not add some fruit into your musical diet? I got this fantastic idea from the wonderful Aileen Miracle at the recent Step Up conference in Brisbane. Students are given a number of artificial fruits and must arrange them to make a four beat pattern. They then speak their fruit pattern and try to work out their pattern is in rhythm names. Try to include a variety

After the release of the 2012 movie Pitch Perfect, you'd be hard-pressed to be in the same room as an adolescent and a cup without hearing some version of the Cup 'Song. You know the one. But just in case you've been under a rock since then, here it is: It's actually a brilliant ostinato and offers a wealth of teaching opportunities (it's become a staple of my tika-ti strategy since then, for instance). It has also taken off across pop culture, inspiring other renditions of t

When I attended the National Conference recently, I picked up a great new take on an old favourite from Jai Schelbach. Because it had a bumblebee flavour, I of course instantly fell in love with it! The song can be found in Catch A Song (Kodaly teacher's bible) as "Witchety Jamboree" but in this new version the words are changed to Bumblebee Jamboree. In the game, children mill around the classroom stepping to the beat. All sing along, stopping to listen for the colour that w

So whilst the shops are already starting to stock mince pies and play Christmas albums (no joke, I heard Winter Wonderland the other day!) there's another cultural holiday coming up a little sooner that I always get excited about. Halloween can be a controversial topic in Australian classrooms as it is not traditionally celebrated in Australia and some see the rise in Trick or Treat-ing as a sign of American influence and commercialisation. However, I think that it be acknowl

Today I'd like to talk about my saa presentation strategy. In case you're not too familiar with Kodaly methodology, the "presentation" segment of a unit happens only once in one lesson, and usually only lasts about 2 minutes. It's the moment where we tie together all of the aural and visual information we have about a sound and finally name it. Kids love this moment and by the time we get to it, they're usually falling over themselves to find out what it's called! (Or, in the

I first came across the concept of centres or stations a few years ago when I was doing some classroom release for a leading teacher. The activities she had left for me were part of a whole-year-level Literacy Rotation. This involved grouping together various students by ability and allowing them to rotate around different activities related to literacy such as a worksheet practising suffixes, a creative writing task or a reading comprehension activity aided by the teacher. A

Teaching Tika-tika is perhaps one of my favourite units of Primary Music! The students are becoming more familiar with the process of discovering new rhythms and they now have enough in their vocabulary to make their compositions and improv more varied and rewarding and you can really see a maturity start to come into the way they treat the music. Now that they have these cool sounds to play with, they're starting to feel like real musicians! Some of my favourite songs, games

Rhythmic dictation can sometimes feel like a necessary evil in the music curriculum. Students can feel under pressure in test-like conditions, there is a need for silence in order to complete the activity, it can feel at times like the un-fun but necessary part of music education. Well, it doesn't have to be like this. Rhythmic dictation has become one of my favourite things to teach once I made one simple discovery: there are more ways to write down a rhythm than just using

An apple a day keeps the doctor away, or so goes the old adage. But did you know that an apple a day can also improve your students' musicianship? Apple, Apple In the early days of prep music (first year of primary school) you need to ascertain your students' prior learning and work out what skills & knowledge they already possess so that you can establish a program from there that is pitched at the right level for them. Depending on the type of musical education they receive

As I'm sure you will know if you've ever worked with children (if you have, you've come to the right place!), kids LOVE talking about food! Imagining food, describing food, even hearing about food - I don't think the Famous Five would have been quite as big a hit without their lashings of ginger beer! Anyway, nothing excites kids quite like a picnic, so why not capitalise on that in your music lessons? Below are a series of activities I learned from the wonderful Kate Thompso

Hello there, fellow Kodalyphiles! Today you're in for a mega blog that has been a long time coming. I have been looking a lot recently at doing themed lessons (having a central idea that links together several different songs and activities into one cohesive lesson - great for smooth transitions!) and as I was going through my song lists looking for possible themes I realised just how many great songs there are out there about chickens! Now my chicken puppets are some of my f