QuadBlogging Connects Student Writers with Global Audiences | Edutopia

QuadBlogging Connects Student Writers with Global Audiences | Edutopia

Hmm. I wonder if it is time to Blog with the writers at Parkdale Elementary school.

This summer we hosted six people from the Czech Republic for a couple of days. They found their way to Timberline, Laurence Lake and Tamawanas Falls for local hiking before venturing up to Washington and across to Montana and then back down to California and home. I love Couchsurfing.org.

I am thinking about music a lot. I have always sung. The first recording that I made was when I was in kindergarten at Castle School and my mom rewrote the words to "Wouldn't It Be Loverly?" from the musical ___. We did a play and I played a cat and sang about wanting tuna and milk and "Meow... wouldn't it be loverly?" But that isn't the thing I was thinking about when I started this blog entry.

Lately I have been stretching my mind to learn more music theory because I am in a teacher certification program for ukulele teachers taught by James Hill. I never took a music theory class in school. I sang in choir in high school and in the vocal jazz ensemble in college and was familiar with the idea of intervals but never had to label them or teach them. Now I am learning them so that I can teach them to my second year students that are playing ukulele.

I was searching around on the Ukulele in the Classroom site and found a thread that lead me to The Musical Intervals Tutor. I like how it lists songs that many people are familiar with so that you can imagine the different interval in your "minds ear" before you listen to it. This song starts with a major third. What would it sound like with a minor third instead? This video was done on a FlipVideo last summer near Banyuls Sur Mer in the south of France when James and I couchsurfed with Leonardo.

He took us up to the view between towns. I have a memory blog about our whole couch surfing experience started. I lost my muse when I deleted the notes (note) I was taking on my iPad on the flight home. I am only now beginning to retrace our footsteps.

Back to playing.

I teach ukulele after school to fourth and fifth graders. On Valentine's Day, I think an hour after school is too long! They all needed to take a break in the middle and go get drinks, partly because of the candy they consumed and partly because their fingers were tired from a new strum that I taught them. I think it might be considered a folk strum. The best part of the group was when individuals played the C scale that they have been practicing.

I tune the instruments before they come in, but last week I changed the strings on four of them and they have to be tuned again after about 15 minutes. Well after fifteen minutes I start to hear that they are too far out of tune to sound good they probably are stretching after five minutes. If you have any tricks for getting nylon strings to settle in, let me know.

This is a picture of me from last summer in Geißen, Germany. A two year old took the picture of me holding the guitar that I had just tuned.

First Grade

I have the old Quasar VHR camera in my room. It only works plugged in, but the first graders love it. I use it to record their reader's theater so that they could hear and see themselves. Every group I have is intrigued by the camera, so I have incorporated a bit of movie making into the end of the year activities, but am thinking that it is so motivating that we should start the process earlier.

 I use hard copy story boards for the "shot" and the basic lines spoken, and then teach the camera experts how to zoom in and zoom out, start and stop recording, and how to operate the tripod.

The end of the year fifth grade group is gathering "Favorite Memory" stories for the promotion party this Friday. They will be dropping video clips into Movie Maker, and adding some music as background. We had one digital video camera that makes little Quick Time movies that had to be converted, so we used a You Tube converter program and changed them all to .avi so that the Movie Maker could see them.  If I had parental rights signed, I'd post it at the end, but I don't and I don't think I will get them before Friday.