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.

I found a 1978 SCDC Spanish Curricula Units box that was going to be thrown away. I am always looking for "new" materials and so I opened the teachers edition up and found page 145 where it said to write palo, miel, cama, mesa, nube and the read:

Había una vez un viejo malo/ que andaba con un _________.
Tengo un amigo fiel/ tan bueno como la ________.
Toñito tiene fama/ de saltar en la _________.
Es tanto lo que pesa/ que se rompió la ___________.
Tan alto Nino sube/ que se sente una _________.

Along with talking about using a franelógrafo which is what the authors called the flannel board (for you young people, teachers used to stick pictures made of flannel on a board made of flannel to tell stories) I found a worksheet to mimeograph that had the following word match:
rica  boca
toca  beso
pide pica
mesa  jugo
Hugo  mide

I thumbed through it and the pages were falling out at the spine. It included the pictures what are part of a series of books that were in another box that was/is going to be thrown away. I can't let it go just yet. There are kids in my class room that don't have books at home, and though they are dated, they are easy to read. I had to laugh at the title of one of the stories Pollito Pito, because of the double meaning of pito in Spanish. I don't think I'll send that book home.

I am going to look into see if this series has been updated to include newer pictures and stories.

Tech ideas for my grade level groups

Since I work with kids at all six levels at our elementary school I am going to overview what technology I see kids using at my little school on a regular basis.

In kindergarten the kids all have a chance to do a program called Zip Zoom. It is meant to be comprehensible English for students that don't speak English at home, but most all the kids play it because they learn mousing skills and onset vowel sounds.

 Last year my kindergarten group of 7 kids made an ABC book in MSWord, copying and pasting pictures from a bank that I created. I actually had them print the pictures and  paste them into a cardboard blank book to take home and keep. They used Photo Story to recreate the book and record their voices.

This year the schedule was different and i didn't have one single group that came to me daily, I had groups of five - seven kids that came to me on a rotation.The "conversation" group mostly uses realia to prompt speaking in complete sentences. Sometimes they can take turns on an iPad I bought that has a couple of programs from Montessori that teach letter sounds and how to form them and number sense games. I also got some of the Smart Baby programs that have flash cards to learn vocabulary. As squirmy as they often are, they can generally focus on what the other students are doing on the iPad when it is not their turn. It is pretty motivating. I hope we can get a couple more.

Tabajando con palabras

Near the beginning of the year we started rotations with students learning to read and write in Spanish. I have paper letter tiles and plastic "benches" to sit them on and I have the students build words. Here are some of the sequences I used. Sometimes I ask them what I have to do to change the word on the bench to the next word, and sometimes I tell them what to change.

Here is a shortened version of the directions. Use the first line as the example: Escriban la palabra mi, como en la oración Es mi perro. Mi. Ahora, quiero que quite el vocal y cámbialo al vocal "e". ¿Qué palabra es? Me. Sí! Cambia la primera letra, el consonante a un "t". ¿Qué palabra es? Te. Sí!  Ahora, quite el vocal y cámbialo al vocal "i" . ¿Qué palabra es? Ahora deja ti al lado izquierdo. Escriba la sílaba "to" al lado derecha. Juntalas dos partes, ¿Qué palabra es? tito? Es un nombre de alguien. Debe voltear la "t" para que sea mayúscula. ¿Qué nombre tenemos si cambia el "i" a "o"? Toto, muy bien. ¿Qué palabra tendrías si pongas un "n" entre las dos sílabas? tonto. Sí. ¿Y si cambia los vocales a "a"? tanta. Cambia la primera "a" a "o". Cambia la "o" a "i".

I find that I can see which students have difficulty or are very quick with left /right, first/last, vowel&consonant (they are different colors so that helps), tracking left to right, sound/letter names. In the lowest level learners, I take away the letters all together and just work on hearing the sounds in words.

mi-me-te-ti-to-Tito-Toto-tonto-tanta-tonta-tinta-pinta-cinta-quinto-pinta-pintura-cintura-cura-curita
puma-espuma-pluma
Toto-tonto-tono-mono-monto-moto-foto-roto-Rita-quita-queso-quepo
va-chiva-chivo-chivos
va-chiva-viva-vida-visa
va-chiva-Chava-ccharla-ala-sala-alas-sala-sola-ola-olla-silla
cosa-rosa-risa-pisa-tisa-masa-mapa
su-tu-tus-tio-tios-tias-mias-misa-tisa-risa-sonrisa
oruga-tortuga-corre-torre-toro-topo-topa-ropa-sopa-sola-bola-hola-halo-hallo
pin-sin-cine-cisne-tina-pina-espina
pato-Pati-pato-zapato
frente-gente-siente-diente
blusa-bloco-loco-toco-toca-troca-roca-ronca
martillo-anillo-zorrillo-zorro-porra-mora
tio-frio-fria-fruto-fruta-frente-mente
roca-troca-truco-trozo-trampa-trompeta
tía- fría-frío-tío-amarillo-martillo