Our 2nd-5th grade students are building their music literacy this year through a curriculum called Conversational Solfege. This program is going to help our students hear, read, write, and create their own rhythmic and tonal patterns and songs.
Because this is a new program to our school this year, all students in grades 2-5 will start out on Unit 1, learning about rhythms in duple meter. To start, we needed to build our repertoire of songs in duple meter.
One of the songs fourth and fifth graders learned for this purpose was "Good King Wenceslas." For added fun, we sang this song on the neutral syllable "bum" and added motions.
Once we were comfortable with singing the song in unison, we sang it as a round - first in two parts, then four, then eight! It was challenging, but we loved the effect that happened at the end (stay tuned - we will show you at our Holiday Programs in December!).
Once we knew the song really well, students were able to decode the rhythmic patterns that they heard in the song, singing with rhythm syllables. We're off to a great start!
Hear Mrs. Hyland's fourth grade class sing this song in the video below. Check out our Holiday Program in December to hear it as a round!
