Contour is fun to teach to children. I first made it a puzzle for us to put together. However, before you can put a song puzzle together, you have to know the song. So for the sake of this lesson, the children will have to know well the following songs so that they can sing them independently:
A Sailor Went to Sea Sea Sea
Are You Sleeping?
Happy Birthday
London Bridge
Skip to My Lou
The Farmer in the Dell
This Old Man
Twinkle Twinkle Little Star
You can learn the actions for the following songs if you don't already know them:
A Sailor Went to Sea Sea Sea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIISqlIWZEQ
London Bridge http://www.ehow.com/how_2085902_play-london-bridge-falling-down.html
The Farmer in the Dell http://www.dltk-teach.com/rhymes/farmer/song.htm
This Old Man https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGpmbuxiYrM
The song sheets below are used for all of these activities - but in different ways.
ACTIVITY #1 - Print out the song pages for the children. Then sing the songs while touching each "note" of the melody while you sing it. This activity helps the children "feel" the upward/downward movement of the melody while they sing. It also introduces them to long and short notes.
ACTIVITY #2 - Match the songs with their titles. For this activity I cut off the top of each sheet and the children had to figure out which song went with each title.
ACTIVITY #3 - Put the song puzzles together.
For the song puzzles, I printed out the pages and cut them into pieces. Most of the songs have 4 pieces to the song plus the title of the song. Twinkle Twinkle has 6 pieces plus the title. I put those pieces in envelopes and labeled each envelope with the name of the song. My kids worked with a partner to do this. I did this activity last so that they have had plenty of experience with the contour sheets and the songs before they did it. The children laid the pieces on the floor in order they thought the song would go. I color coded the phrases so that I could easily give the children the answers. For example, A Sailor Went to Sea answer would be: Green, Orange, Purple, Blue.
Dear Ms. Harbertson,
ReplyDeleteI love this method for teaching the concept of melodic contour. Do you have any images for "Silent Night"? Can you tell me how to make my own using the shapes you have shown in the images above?
Many thanks,
Patricia Petersen
I am so sorry I have not been on my blog for a long time. I have created all my visuals using shapes in Word. I would make a staff with lines and then create my shapes in different sizes to represent the different notes, then line them up on the staff and once created, delete the staff lines. You can do the same thing with squares or any shape. I used the staff lines so that my contour was an accurate representation but at this point I was not teaching music reading so that I why I deleted the staff lines afterwards. You can save as a word document and print or to post I use the snipping tool to create jpg files.
Delete