Thursday rolls around and it’s back to Donegan School up the hill from me on Fourth Street. I love being only a mile from the school.
I decided to leave the rhythm bag at home and bring my mandolin. I started off with it, and explained its relationship to the violin and reviewed the physics of string vibrations. I then used it to do Down By the Bay and introduce some simple songwriting. We came up with a few good ones, and I encouraged the kids to draw pictures. We’ll see.
Did you ever see a camel styling in his sandals?
Did you ever see a piranha chomping on a pinata?
I launched into the more difficult work with We Gave Names to the Animals from there and both 5th and 4th grades did some good, focused work. The 3rd grade lands at the end of the morning, so that group really has trouble concentrating. Again, I asked for the kids to draw pix of their verse.
5th Grade excelled with this one:
I saw a reptile crawl out of the sea,
Black, brown, yellow, as colorful as can be.
It comes out of the water for a short time, not a lot’ll.
I’ll call this animal an axolotl.
I finished up with Jelly in the Dish with the scarves. It was a good idea to have everyone get up and dance at this point and it brought each session to a great finish. We did some reflections at the end, per usual, and the teachers really liked the rhyming work we did.
I have a week to figure out where to go from here. The time flew by again.