Kindergarten/ 1st Grade Pitch Exploration

Pitch exploration is so important for the younger students.  We as music teachers help student explore their voices in many ways- Animal Sounds, sirens, "ghost voices", buzzing bees, etc.  John Feierabend has a pitch exploration story set that I use often in my class, as well as great book ideas but this summer I worked with another teacher- thanks Jaime Pitts Parker!- in my Graduate Classes to make a "book" that takes us through the entire year.  It is in the form of a power point that I project onto my SMARTboard.  Each page is repeated so that the students can use their voices to follow the lines that I have drawn and then on the next page they can draw their own.  It takes the form of a train ride going to different places and seeing different things as the seasons progress.  The students LOVE the fact that it is interactive- and even if you don't have a SMARTboard you can project onto a white board and do the same thing :)

Some examples of a few of the pages statements are below:

Look out the window at the leaf falling from the tree! Can you make your voice match the leaf path?

It's Snowing! Which snowflake path does my voice match?

I love going to the amusement park in the summer! Let's match the path of the hills on the roller coaster with our voices!

It's great to visit the zoo! Keep your hands and feet in the train until we come to a full and complete stop.  Look! A Lion! Can you make a Lion sound?  What are some of your favorite animals? Can you make their sounds?

I love to use these each week- doing a page or so as they correspond with the seasons. I always have a few kids draw new lines or make the new sounds.

Click HERE to go to my Teachers Pay Teachers store to see a LOT of the awesome Vocal Exploration files I have made.  There are also a few, not so pretty, but still very functional files on my WIX site (tab above). Once at the Wix site, click "For Colleagues" and then you can look at some SMARTboard files and other files I mention on my blog.


Have a great weekend! Only a few more weeks of school for many of us this year.  Don't worry- I will still post over the summer :)