 The new header for the Puzzle page on the website I sent the first draft of the Magnetic Puzzle to the printer last night. I am SUPER excited to start using this material with my students. I often wish that I had considered curriculum development when I was an elementary school teacher. Sometimes I can't fall asleep at night because I am thinking about new ways to teach something. I have also created a new page for the puzzle under the materials section of the website. This is where you will find games that use the puzzle. The first game is up already (dictation). As we use the puzzle I will determine if we need more of some symbols and less of others. On a side note, but still related, my 4 and 5 year olds saw the puzzle drafts that I had printed on plain paper and decided to cut them up before school yesterday. In the afternoon I helped them make an interval symbols chart. They are very into "projects" right now and this definitely fulfilled that role. 
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 In this lesson I wanted the girls to review the scale going up and down, practice jumping up 2, and try doing ison. I asked them what game they would like to play with the Greek letter cards and they chose to play Fat Snake*. They have most of the Greek letters down now. They were each unsure of one letter but figured it out between the two of them.
I started working on a new material recently: the guide cards for the Parallage Phrases. You can see some of the possibilities above (cut each option in half to get 2 cards). One guide card will go on each side of the phrases and will be there for students to look at as reference. The cards will be the same size as the Parallage Phrase cards so that they can be rubber banded together.
In church the Sunday before our lesson, my eldest student asked me, "When are we going to get to the tones?" I know that the feeling of accomplishment is important for students because it motivates them and make learning exciting. Since we needed to have a short lesson I decided to focus on 2 things: coming down the scale and getting into mode 1 in the Parallage Phrases. Since I knew they had been practicing the Nightly "Ni", I was hopeful that they would do better with the "up 2" and "up 3" jumps that I put had put back into the early phrases. So, we started with the scale. In order to practice coming down the scale we played Fine* and Oligon/Apostrophos with the Ni Pa Vou cards (it probably should have just been Apostrophos). They had a lot of fun with the scale games as usual.  Next we did the Parallage Phrases, skipping the first ten phrases. Once we got to phrase 19 or 20 we added something new. I had them put their Ni Pa Vou cards in order next to their phrases. Then I gave them some magic notes and we matched them up next to the Ni Pa Vou cards. Then they used more magic notes to write out the phrase on the card. When they finished I asked them to chant it in their heads before we did it together.
Both girls did really well with the "up 2" jump. I started doing ison for them and they were able to go from ni to vou by themselves and stay on pitch for the most part. I only joined them on the melody if they were getting off pitch. I also joined them on a new phrase that introduced a new symbol. They wanted to chant on their own, so in general I tried to chant softly on the melody or do ison. In lessons 4 and 5 we continued to work with both scale materials and the Parallage Phrases. We haven barely used the interval cards so far so I need to think about ways that they could be useful at this stage of learning.
During our Parallage practice, in lesson 3 I noticed that the girls weren't ready for the up two jump vocally. They also were not always able to get the correct pitch when moving up or down the scale. So, I reworked the phrases and added 10 more phrases before the up 2 set so that they could get more practice but still learn new material. |
Amy HoggSAHM by day; ByzB curriculum developer by night. My career was in teaching: kindergarten, first grade, bilingual reading, Suzuki piano, and Music Mind Games. Now I paint icons and spend lots of time making materials on the computer. My greatest joy is directing my students in their learning. This blog documents the process and provides a space for my other ramblings as well. Archives
March 2018
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