Grade 4 General Music, February 2025
4th grade students are making excellent progress learning the song Sing by Pentatonix. They have learned all the words and melodies, and now we are working on building confidence and learning the body percussion to make the piece even more exciting. We will also begin learning our next piece in preparation for our concert. At Lincoln and Roosevelt, that will be 50 Nifty. At Hoover that will be a song called The Dream Keeper by Rollo Dilworth, the text of which is a poem by Langston Hughes. Students at all three schools will also be learning a poem about dreams by Langston Hughes; they will have a choice between Harlem, Dreams, and Dream Dust. We will discuss connections between Hughes’ poems and Dr. King’s I Have a Dream speech.
For folk dancing this month, we are working on moving safely and in time with the music. Students have been struggling with dancing safely and politely with a partner, especially if the partner is not their first choice, so we will be focusing on how we can politely interact with everyone in the class, even if they are not our best friend. We will also be discussing moving our feet with the beat of the music.
In music literacy, Hoover students are working on decoding and reading rhythms in 6/8 time using dotted quarter notes and sets of three eighth notes. Students at Lincoln and Roosevelt have completed that work and are moving on to write down rhythms they hear and creating their own rhythms and writing them down.
In January, we explored the history of the ukulele, learned the parts of the instrument, and learned how to safely handle the instrument. 4th grade students are excited to begin learning how to play the ukulele! We will be learning how to play melodies on a single string, as well as learning our first chord, the C chord, and a variety of strumming patterns. Depending on how quickly students achieve success, we may be able to add the A minor chord this month as well.
