Since the holiday break, we have been learning about instrument families in music class. We began with the percussion instruments, which the children will tell you is any instrument which is shaken or tapped to make music. We have also learned about wind instruments (which we sometimes call "blowing" instruments) and we will soon move to the stringed instrument family.
With this unit there is a great deal of focused listening, which sharpens auditory skills to discern subtle differences in the sounds, in this case the timbres and pitches, of what we hear. For example, we have been listening to Benjamin Britten's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, the percussion variation. The children learned to distinguish between the eight percussion instruments they heard: drums, glockenspiel, triangle, woodblock, tambourine, clacker, whip and cymbal.
Other orchestral pieces we use to learn about instrument families are Saint-Saens Carnival of the Animals and Prokofieff's Peter and the Wolf. There are also lots of instrument demonstrations these days, including recorder, trumpet, violin, cello, and lots of percussion. So if your child suddenly develops an intense interest in the piccolo, you'll know why! ~Ms. Susanne
Nice to know what the kids are doing at music class, my little one is always telling me about the class, and he keep telling me every Tuesday -"Ms. Susanne was here today but it was not my day for music class"-
ReplyDelete