Fourth Grade Assignments

We have been busy in fourth grade music these last two weeks! We started learning songs of America's Armed Forces. We started with the song of the U.S. Army, The Caissons, and then added the song of the U.S. Marines, The Marine's Hymn.

We continued to work on learning instruments of the orchestra and added the word "timbre" to our music elements graphic organizers. Students learned that timbre is a word used to describe the way an instrument sounds.

Fourth graders started learning the notes of the scale using solfege syllables (do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do). Most people are familiar with these syllables as they were made famous by the song Doe a Deer from The Sound of Music. The purpose of learning these syllables is to help students learn how to sing on pitch. We also learned hand signs to go along with each syllable. Hand signs are a way of giving a physical placement for a vocal pitch. As we move up the scale, our hands move up in the air.

After learning all the solfege syllables and hand signs, we then put our new knowledge to use. Students listened to Mortimer, the story of a little boy who refuses to be quiet. We practiced going up and down the scale every time someone would go up and downstairs to tell Mortimer to be quiet. We also had lots of fun making a tremendous amount of noise with our voices and rhythm instruments as Mortimer sang his noisy song.

We finished off our time together by learning about the staff, the treble clef, and the musical alphabet. We learned the names of the lines and spaces on the staff and had fun spelling words with notes

Fourth graders have already learned three songs so far this year: America, America, the Beautiful, and My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean. We particularly enjoyed the last one as we played a fun game while we sang. Every time we sang a word that starts with the letter B, we had to either stand up or sit down.

We continued our study of music elements. After reviewing Melody and Harmony, we added Rhythm and Beat to our graphic organizers. We learned that "Rhythm changes; beat stays the same," and we practiced keeping a steady beat while clapping, snapping, and stomping. For rhythm, we made a chart in our organizers and learned about notes and rests and their values. Then we spent some time creating four-beat rhythm patterns and learning how to clap and count them.

We played a game where the students had to organize themselves based on different directions. They classified themselves according to gender, eye color, shirt color, height or shoe types. We found that it was easier to sort by eye color than it was by shoe type, and discovered that with shoes in particular there were many different ways to form groups.

This led to a lesson on the classifying of instruments. We learned that there are four basic instrument groups: strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion. We also learned that there is now a fifth category called keyboards that includes instruments like pianos, organs, harpsichords and electronic keyboards. We talked about the types of instruments in each family. Then we spent some time listening to Benjamin Britten's The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra to gain an understanding of what the different families of instruments sound like