Mother's Day

We started learning our Mother's day songs today, and it went so amazingly well. I received a degree in music education at BYU, and have been trying to use the things they taught me in my early childhood music classes. One of the biggest things they tried to emphasize is that
1)Don't try to teach part to whole, but whole to part. In other words, try to sing the entire song 90% of the time, instead of by phrases.
2) Let each repetition have purpose and meaning

I find these things to be difficult to do while holding the children's attention. Today, I think I finally would have made my professors proud! :)

We are singing "Dearest Names" and then going right into the first verse of "Love at home". Today I taught Dearest names.

I picked this one because it is not a familiar one, but I thought the kids would grasp on to it quickly. They totally did!

The words:
I know a name, a glorious name,
dearer than any other!
Listen, I'll whisper the name to you...
It is the name of Mother!
Mother, so tender and kind and true,
I love you! I love you!
Mother, so tender and kind and true,
I love you!

I started out by bringing a duck puppet, but any puppet or no puppet would work. For Sr.'s I didn't use the pupped. I told them my friend (the duck) wanted to sing them a special song about someone, but she was really shy, and would only whisper the name to someone listening very carefully.

I sang the first half of the song. When I got to "Listen, I'll whisper the name to you..." I started walking around the primary with my puppet and bent down to a child to whisper "mother" when the song came to it. Then, I had that child come to the front and we started the song over and we each picked a child to whisper "mother" too. Then the 2 new children, plus the original child and I, went back to the front, where we started the song again. It only took a few times through the song, before each child had been whispered the word.

Next, I had them sing with me from the beginning, and really sing out the special word, to make sure we all heard it right. At this point, I took off the puppet.

For the next half of the song, I showed them the sign language for "I Love you" (you know, the one we all know) and asked them to raise their hand if they knew what it meant. I was actually surprised at how few hands went up. I told them to listen to the next part where I would tell them would the sign language meant. I did the sign language everytime I sang "I love you" then invited them to sing the second half with me, and do the sign language with me. We did this a few times.

Lastly, I asked them if they could stomp their feet, Left foot then right foot, to the word "Moth-er". We tried that a few times. Then, we stomped our feet as we sang the second half and did the sign language to "I Love you." Then I had them listen for three things "mother" is and put their fingers up 1-2-3 as we sang them, WHILE doing everything else.

The next time, we clapped on the words "tender","kind" and "true"., while stomping on mother and doing the sign language.

For Sr.'s we kept going. I had them stomp on mother, but clap on all the "and" words. That was tricky.
Then, I had them pat one leg than the other (right left) for "tender", snap on "kind" and tap their head on "true".
the last time, we did everything above, but added the claps in between the words on "and".

Then of course, we had to sing it from top to bottom a few times. They LOVED it. and you can see how many times we were able to repeat the song.

Sigh, I LOVE successful sundays. :)

Teach and Review with Ker-plunk!

So, it's been some time since I've had any ideas for singing time, but I finally came up with one! I've been trying to come up with an idea that would be fun, capture their attention, but also let us learn and review the song. This is my idea...

I am teaching "When He Comes Again" for the April song, but this idea would work for any song and can be used in many different ways.

Ker-plunk is a game I picked up at toys r us for about $12. If you have never seen it, the basic concept is that a bunk of sticks are placed through the middle of two cups, and then marbles are placed on top of the sticks. One by one, the sticks are removed, while trying not to let any of the marbles fall.

There are three colors of sticks. Neon Pink, Neon Orange, and Neon Green.

I have divided my song into three phrases and coordinated them with the color.

Neon Pink: "I wonder when he comes again. Will herald angels sing? Will earth be white with drifted snow, or will the world know spring?"

Neon Orange: "I wonder if one star will shine far brighter than the rest? Will daylight stay the whole night through? Will song birds leave their nest?"

Neon Green: "I'm sure he'll call his little ones, to gather round his kneee, because he said in days gone by, suffer them to come to me."

I'll call up children to remove a stick. If the stick they chose drops marbles, we will sing that color's phrase. How many marbles drop, will determine how many times we will sing the phrase...up to 4 times through. (so if 6 marbles drop, the maximum times we will sing that phrase would still be 4).

In order to keep their attention through the repeating of phrases, I have visuals for the words, about 3 per phrase. I'll pick three kids to hold them up and get them in the right order. If we need to sing it again, they will pick someone else to hold their picture and get it in the right order. Hopefully I'll be able to use all of them at least once, hopefully more.

I'm not sure if I'll do the same thing with the Sr.'s or not, since they pretty much already know the song, but I'm hoping this will help out my Jr's. :)

You pick Songs results

Thank you everyone for sharing your songs for the months of April and July. I was finally able to come to a conclusion. I will be doing "I wonder When He Comes Again" for April and "Teach Me to Walk in the Light" for July. It is such a relief to have these chosen!

Just in case you are still agonizing over the decision, here are the results:

Most people are doing "He Sent His son" and "I Feel My Savior's Love" for April and July, but here are the other options:

April
I wonder When He Comes Again
He Sent his Son
I Feel My Savior's Love
He Did that We Might Live Again
Jesus Once was a little Child
Beautiful Savior

July

My Family Is of God
Teach Me to Walk in the Light
He Sent His Son
I Feel My Savior's Love
Jesus Wants me for a Sunbeam
Where Love Is
A Child's Prayer
Love at Home
The Lord is My Light
Did Jesus Really live Again?

Good Luck!

Reveiw the songs: Face off

The are so many great ideas out there - especially with so many fabulous sisters sharing their ideas online and sometimes I get overwhelmed and want to try so many of them. The other night as I lay in bed ponder the upcoming Sunday (today) I said a prayer asking for help to know what it was that my Primary needed - what would be a good way to review the songs learned so far. The following idea came to mind:

Have two children come to the front and give one of them an object to hold. The one holding the object begins the song, then, whenever they want, they pass the object to the other child and then it is the other child's turn to sing. They keep passing the object back and forth and only the one holding the object sings. Now, if they come to a part of the song where they are unsure of the words the primary kids that are sitting down can raise their hand and sing that part of the song.

The idea was so simple, and didn't require much from me, rather it was putting it all in the hands of the kids. It was fabulous and fun. For the object I used 4 block letters that spelled "home" and used one block at a time, so that each song got sung through 4 times. I used this game to review the three songs we've learned this year. First we sang through the song together as a primary and then I used the popsicle sticks to choose children to come up and sing. We have a combined jr and sr primary and I was nervous about calling on the little kids to come sing, but I shouldn't have worried - they did great, really, some of them knew the songs better than the older kids. When the child who was singing stumbled on some words, the other primary children would raise their hand, I would choose one, and they would "sing" that part of the song and then the child whose turn it was would resing that part and then continue on.
From this little song review I would have to surmise that my Primary likes the "Family is of God" song best. When the two children were taking their turns singing on most of the songs the other kids in the primary were quietly listening, but on the Family is of God, especially on the chorus, almost all of the primary kids were quietly singing along - it sounded really neat.

Our primary is small and almost all the kids had a turn. There were actually a few who didn't want to take their turn and a couple of them I had to encourage to come up and do the best they could, but the majority of them were dying to have another turn. One advantage for me was I was able to assess each child and see where they might need extra help. Like I said, some of the little kids really surprised me and they knew much more of the words than I supposed they did. It is the older kids that I need to figure out how to get them to open their mouths more and sing because they were the ones more unsure of some of the words.

My Eternal family...revisited.

I mentioned this on my original teaching post of My Eternal Family, but it worked SO well yesterday, I just had to share again.

I didn't try it for Jr. primary, but it worked awesome for Sr. primary.

The first week of March we introduced the song. The second week was stake conference. So this week, I wanted to see how much they remembered. I had my "scattered visuals" on the board, held up with magnets. I told them we would play a game of "tag". I picked a child to start. She was to find the first picture, and then tag someone to find the next picture, etc. The rest of the primary just sang the song over and over with the flip chart until all the pictures were in order. We got through it 7 1/2 times! :)

I told them that was pretty good, since we had only one week to learn it, but I thought we could do much better. Then I called on 4 kids to come up and work as a team to put the visuals in order while the primary sang. They got it done before we finished the song even one time! we did this a few times, and the kids were edging out of their chairs to have a chance to prove how well they knew the song. We obviously couldn't let the ENTIRE primary do it, so I called up two kids to turn over one picture each. When we sang through the song and came to the picture turned over, I DID NOT SING, to see how well they knew it. We turned over 2-3 pictures each round.

They are really learning this song well. It was one of those activities where even the kid-that's-too-cool-for-singing-time was participating. YAY for successful sundays! :)

Song - the 12 apostles

In preparation for General Conference next month we are helping the kids get familiar with the 12 apostles. I have 8x10 pictures of each of the 12 apostles (we are still including Elder Worthlin, even though he passed away - the song doesn't work as well with only 11). We use the music from "The Books of the Book of Mormon" in the childrens songbook and sing the apostles in order of seniority - Elder Packer down to Elder Christofferson. Each time we sing (this is our 2nd Sunday doing this) I first go through the pictures and say the apostles name and have them repeat and then we try singing slowly with the music.

I first started this with my own children who are 6 and 4 years old and when they would see a picture of an apostle in the Ensign or somewhere, or hear their names mentioned in church they would say, "hey, I know him". I wondered if becoming familiar with the apostles would help kids be a little more interested in conference if they "knew" some of the speakers, instead of them just being "some old guy" ( that was always my thoughts when I was little).
At the least, the primary kids are enjoying learning the song.

Free choice songs for April and July

So, I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm having a really hard time deciding on songs for these months! I know a lot of you are NOT slackers like I am and already have them picked, and probably on CD's for your kids!

So, I thought it would help to "poll the audience" to see what songs you are doing for these months, and then I'll post the results.

For April, I think I've decided to do The Easter Hosannah (Children's Songbook (68 & 69). I guess one of my struggles is that I feel the words need to teach something and need to relate to the monthly topic. There was a song in the friend by Janice Kapp Perry, (1999?) called "I Love to Learn of Jesus Christ" that I thought about doing, but I can not find a recording of it to put on a CD for the kids (which I still plan on doing, once I figure out these months).

I would love any of your ideas, and I'm betting there are others out there in the same boat that I am!