Session One - Werner Beidinger
We took "A Trip To The Moon"! This piece was written by Werner. It is actually a rondo, with lots of fun movement for each of the different parts. An important take-away for me is that it helps to be specific with children what you expect of them when you ask them to move. If I just play music and ask them to move, they may not know what they are to do! Give them a situation, such as walking through pudding, or swinging, or weightlessness (on the moon). There was lots of movement today, and then Werner modeled the process for transferring body percussion to the Orff instruments. There are folks in these sessions who have never taken a music course! So the idea of a moving bordun was very foreign. Many quick lessons occurred in about five minutes to bring these people up to speed!
Oh, what I would give to have this instrumentarium AND storage space!!
Now this session was intriguing from the moment I entered the room! Having enough manipulatives (square boxes about 18"x18") and instruments was essential for this lesson, but if we fell short, sharing was ok, just not as much fun. The boxes were marked on all six sides with either drawings of instruments or music notation. We built structures with the boxes, broke them down and started again and again -- just like children do when they play with blocks. We did MANY activities with these boxes, including break into groups and create a scenario of what we "had" in our boxes! We eventually did countless rhythm reading exercises, but they didn't feel like exercises! There was so much flexibility. Remember, with this being an international course, everyone's language brings other considerations to the table -- reading backwards, up to down. That led to reading in many different directions, and we even had to guess the paths some people took! I felt like the door was opened and we were "allowed" to go in any direction we wished -- just ENDLESS possibilities!!
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