Also, our primary sings at a nursing home, twice a year, one which occured just last week, so I've been trying to get ready for that and Father's day. I haven't even introduced this month's song yet!
That being said, I really struggled with this song. I sat down shortly after my last post, all excited to create a flipchart, and just couldn't wrap my head around how to put images to the words. It's especially difficult, as we are not to try to portray the "holy ghost" in any way.
However, HUGE thanks to Tiffany from Port Orchard, who e-mailed me HER flip chart! I think it's awesome and hopefully it will be of help to some of you
Word Document here and PDF file here
She also did the second verse, but I just didn't post the pictures here....
As far as introducing the song...if you haven't already, I love this idea HERE on Camille's primary blog page, and also HERE, on I Sing U Sing. Both are fantastic resources as well
I noticed that the 1st half of this song is pretty much made up of 2 chords: 1 and 5. I brought in boomwhackers (plastic pipes cut to "tuned" lenghths - see boomwhackers.com) and had the kids whack out the chords as we sang. We quickly learned the 1st half (using the words for both verses in turn). With a whole month to learn it I then left it at that. We had fun with "do as I'm doing" (up high is whacking on your head, down low is whacking your shoe). The best bit was when I then gave half the senior kids a boomwhacker each and lined them up to make a full octave giant xylophone. They whacked out the melody for "I am a child of God" It was awesome.
ReplyDeleteThe following week I brought in a glockenspiel. We used my usual pitch conducting and repetition to learn the second half of the piece. I showed the kids the letters above the music and got the senior kids to take turns playing the written letters as we sang (my glock has labelled keys). This was HARD, but there is a cool pattern to make it easier (much easier to SHOW than to explain by writing but I'll try!)If you take 1 chord per bar you get F B E A D G C (I'm only counting the G in the second last bar). For the musically trained this is a classic circle of fifths chord progression where each step is a fifth from the preceding step.
When you show it on a keyboard using alternate hands for the notes it gets even more cool: Right F, left B, right E etc. what you get is each hand walking down the keys like they were stairs: F E D C and B A G. I pointed out that it finishes on C which is the key the piece is in. A cool chance to show the maths of music. Challenging my kids seems to be the best way to get them to really engage with the music time session, and it makes it more fun for me.
Thank you!
ReplyDelete~ LDS Young Women
I don't mean to be negative but I don't believe a bird should represent the holy ghost... I know it's quite hard to portray him but we should concentrate on teaching children how the holy ghost works or they could get the wrong idea that other churches have which is, the holy ghost can change form.
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