School – Week 13

This was the week of Thanksgiving, so it was a short one. I mostly finished up some activities with my classes that I’ve already talked about in other posts.

Turkey, Turkey, Turkey: One new intervention I used was Thanksgiving themed. I used the idea from this blog post. The kids in the class sat in a circle, with one person outside facing away. I sang the song listed in the post, while we passed a paper turkey that I colored and cut out around the circle. As it ended, the student with the turkey hid it behind his or her back. Then the student outside the circle asked or sang “Turkey where are you?” (I didn’t focus as much on the actual singing for my students – if they didn’t want to sing I didn’t force them). Then whoever had the turkey said “You’ll never find me” while trying to disguise their voice. A couple different categories I had for different voices were high pitched, low pitched, silly voice, under water voice (moving finger back and forth on lips while talking), whisper, talking with your tongue out, etc. Then I gave the person outside the circle two chances to guess who has the turkey. I used this less as a specific lesson or assessment focused on singing and made it more of a socialization activity where they got to be a little silly and make different voices. They also had to follow directions and continue to pass the turkey even if they wanted to be the person who holds it.

That’s really all for Week 13!

– Arianna (:

School – Week 7

Mad Libs: This is literally always a hit. With the older classes, I use the specific terms noun, verb, and adjective, but with younger classes I usually say “I need a random word” or “I need a word that is an action” and I’ll give an example. The songs I used for this were Airplanes (I usually start with that one, because I’ll do the chorus quickly and then demonstrate for the kids, which usually hooks anyone who wasn’t engaged once they hear how ridiculous it sounds), Roar, Best Day Of My Life, All About That Bass, and What Do You Mean. I didn’t do the whole song — just the first verse and chorus, usually. If you want it to lean more therapeutically, you could select the songs very purposefully and prompt for certain kinds of words (if you’re looking at emotions specifically or anything else). It does address creative thinking, and even impulse control (they usually get excited and yell out words — prompt for raising hands!). For the classes that were particularly interested, I even got some suggestions from them and they got to write their own with a song they enjoy. Some kids wanted to just keep the lyrics the same, which I personally didn’t push.

Vocal Exploration: This was an activity I did with my little guys. I brought in pipe cleaners and we talked about high and low sounds. They got to create their own patterns and we experimented with our voices as we traced the pipe cleaners. At the end, we even made one that linked all of our pipe cleaners together and we followed the whole thing. To keep the kids engaged, I tried making each one a challenge, “Who thinks they can do mine?!” and things like that.

I spent a lot of time doing MadLibs this week, so that’s really all I have!

– Arianna (: