Thanks to the Tremble family for this beautiful picture, more to come! (If you have pics you’d like to share on the blog, let me know!)
It’s here finally, our 2016 production of J. M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan.”
I feel so grateful to so many people- the incredible families who brought snacks, made costumes, helped with rehearsals, brought in props, helped build sets, delivered and picked up kiddos to and from rehearsals and SO. MUCH. MORE.
I’m also so grateful and indebted to the team of Middle Schoolers who worked on this show. From our wonderful Assistant Director Holly, to our brilliant Set Designer Kayla, to our very competent Running Crew, and our extremely talented Pit Band. WOW. How can I say thank you enough? Is it okay to ask you all to never graduate? Or at least ask you to make sure you train the folks coming up the ranks?
Thank you to Dylan Degree for filming our production, please share with your loved ones who couldn’t make it to our show.
The new Folsom Blues Band met for the second time this week. We’re learning the standard 12 Bar Blues chord progression in C Major. For those of you that play an instrument that can play chords, (Maybe piano? Maybe guitar? Maybe Ukulele?) This progression is:
C|C|C|C|
F|F|C|C|
G7|F|C|C|
(4 beats in each measure, 12 measures. Have fun!)
We’ve learned this progression on the Boomwhackers which you’ll see in this video, and on the xylophones, which actually sounds like really beautiful blues! We’ve been working on getting a bluesy drum beat going on using hand drums- which has been challenging. Next week we’ll keep plugging away on the drum pattern and start using the guitar and piano as well!
GO TEAM!
Enjoy this debut video of the Trimester 1 Folsom Blues Band!
After 11th grade my best friend Claire and I decided that it was silly that no towns near us had any theatre stuff over the Summer. So, without thinking too much about the logistics, we asked our High school Drama teacher if she would help us start a camp for kids going into 5th through 8th grades. The program would be two weeks long and at the end we would have a final performance. That year we decided to rewrite “Peter Pan.”
We had 10 campers.
8 years later Summer Performing Arts Explorations (SPAE) lives on with the help of two other best friends Emily and Abby. This year we put on our own production of, “The Lorax,” and we had 37 campers. The production at the end is really fun and gives the program a lot of focus, but there is a wholllllle bunch of stuff that happens during those two weeks that doesn’t get shown during the final performance. We bring in professionals from the area to do workshops in amazing aspects of art like Instruments, Drumming, Light Design, Sound Design, Dance, and more. We design costumes, make up, props, set pieces, play a ton of improvisation games, sing, and build a community. It’s exhausting, but exhilarating.
Want to know more? Check out the SPAE blog.
This video will give you an inside look at what happens at SPAE!
See you soon!
PS: Haven’t sent me a video yet? Time is running out!!
Maybe this dance looks familiar? This was my offering for the RA Show… I just can’t get away from Ogres.
Hi Folsom Musicians!!!
Wow can you believe we’re already half way through July?! It seems that summer is flying by… so that means I’ve got to get my first video to you! This is my fifth summer working at the Governor’s Institute on the Arts. For two weeks, high schoolers from all around Vermont come together to build a community centered around art. That means painting, drawing, sculpting, dancing, singing, acting, writing, playing instruments, designing lights and SO MUCH MORE. This video shows only a glimpse of what the two weeks is like. I would encourage you to check out their website: GIAofVT.com to find out a lot more, BECAUSE YOU ALL NEED TO GO WHEN YOU ARE IN HIGH SCHOOL. Okay. All for now. I’ve been receiving some FANTASTIC videos from you… but I’m thinking more must be on their way…
This year at Folsom we were lucky enough to be offered the Hand Chime Loan Grant from the Handbell Musicians of America. This organization sent us two sets of hand chimes for our classroom, and we put them to good use! Unfortunately not all that we did could be documented, often a teacher needs to be in the moment with students instead of stepping back to document- but I think this blog post will give you a good sense of how we used our chimes. We used them throughout the year in all grades. Only in the 5th and 6th grade did we really do what I would call a Hand Chime Unit, which only lasted about 4 weeks-one day a week. But the end result of that was a very cool hand chime piece read from notation. For the rest of our students we used them to enhance learning and music making in other aspects of our curriculum.
In Kindergarten, just as we learned to keep a steady beat, or a bourdun, using the 1st ad 5th scale degrees on a xylophone, we did this with chimes as well. We sung tunes like “John the Rabbit,” “Pitter Patter,” and “Snowflakes Falling,” while playing our bourdun.
In the following video at 1:05 you will see the First and Second Graders playing the hand chimes as part of our Human Piano! There is one piano player in this video, but sometimes we had two or three piano players playing at once. We did this as the First and Second graders were learning about Sound. They organized themselves from lowest to highest pitch, which they knew from their work in science class that the bigger the chime, the lower the pitch would be.
In First and Second grade we also used the chimes to easily see how sound is made with Vibrations. The bravest students touched the chimes to their noses to feel a major tickling    vibration!
We made the following video on Halloween in the third and fourth grade. We learned “Ghost of John” as a round, then added what we affectionately named the, “Spooky Hand Chimes.” Students then came up with an arrangement that included movement, (start hidden, on the cue of a chime slowly enter the shot, move around room, at end sink to the ground,) and a combination of chime playing and singing. We used this as a way to get everyone to the same place in knowing how to properly play the hand chimes. You can see that there are some students who still struggle to keep the chime vertical.
In fifth and sixth grade we followed the same process with “Ghost of John,” but as one of their classroom teachers is named “Tom” we went to his classroom, circled around him in the dark and sang, “Have you seen the ghost of Tom..” and then left without a word. It was sufficiently spooky.
In fifth and sixth grade many students were ready to read music with the chimes. After only about 10 minutes of rehearsal we worked up an impressive chime piece that I’ve unfortunately lost the video of. Students reflected after, “That sounded SO cool!”
In our 3rd-8th grade spring concert we used the hand chimes in a few pieces.
The third and four graders had given much focus to recorder, so we enhanced our two recorder songs “Gently Sleep” and “Hot Crossed Buns” by adding chimes and fingers cymbals to one, and chimes and xylophones to the other. Students were given the option of what they would like to play in the concert- some who may have felt less comfortable playing recorder were able to play chimes, cymbals, or xylophone- or they looked at it differently, if they were bored of those songs on recorder, they opted to play the other instruments! It worked out great for all!
As we learned to read more notes on recorder, we also read the notes with hand chimes. This way we were reading the notes while singing, playing recorder, and playing hand chimes. Here students are reading “When the Saints Go Marching In.” After I’d lead them through the music once, I asked student volunteers to lead it. This provided an extra challenge in music-reading and listening to these students.
In fifth and sixth grade we learned the folk song “Liza Jane,” and used it to create an Orff-style arrangement on xylophone which we enhanced with percussion and chimes. Students that play in band were given the opportunity to solo over the arrangement using the C concert pentatonic scale. Soloists were able to select which instrumentation they would like behind them as the soloed which allowed us to play with the interesting sound of different combinations.
To end our concert the middle school chorus taught THE AUDIENCE the round, “Now It’s Time to Go.” Once the audience had gotten to know the tune, we sung it as a round, and the middle schoolers brought hand chimes out to audience members to play. Watching their reactions were great, some jumped right in, others were too nervous to play the chimes so they handed them off to others!
The following video includes excerpts from the concert and the 3/4 reading music while playing the hand chimes.
We are still raising money for our own set of these chimes, it’s a project that we’ll continue on with as we’ve had so much fun at all age levels! Thank you endlessly to the Handbell Musicians of America for your generosity, you’ve played an important part in our learning at Folsom this year!
MARK YOUR CALENDARS: the Spring Concert for 3rd-8th grade students will be Thursday May 28th at 6pm. There will be an Art Show that opens at 5:30. Hooray!
Folk Dancing in 3/4 grade:
The first video is from our Second Trimester Celebration of Learning. These students volunteered to play something they’ve been working on for their peers!
The second video is a collection of videos from the past few months. It includes instrumentalists, 1st and 2nd grade solos, finger puppets, and whale calls, Kindergarten presentations of instruments from home, and more!
Inspired by The First Drawing we experimented with what would happen if we drew something that we listened to instead of something we looked at. Every Kindergarten through Sixth Grader listened to Frederick Chopin’s “Minuet Waltz” and we drew what we imagined! The song has no lyrics! It is for solo piano. Here are some of the drawings that this song inspired!
After we shared our drawings we did a movement activity to the same song, and discussed if adding movement made us imagine anything different than what we drew. For many of us, adding movement gave us a whole new perspective on this song. Now YOU can do the movement activity at home! Follow me!
April is Jazz Appreciation Month, and what better way to kick it off than to wish Billie Holiday a Happy 100th Birthday Anniversary!
Billie Holiday was born on April 7th, 1915 and died in 1959.
One of the most influential and beautiful jazz singers of all time.
Her recordings speak for themselves.
The first, “Night and Day” by Cole Porter (One of Ms. K’s favorite songs.)
Next, “God Bless the Child,” written by Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog Jr.
Thanks to the Tremble family for this beautiful picture, more to come! (If you have pics you’d like to share on the blog, let me know!)
As we learned to read more notes on recorder, we also read the notes with hand chimes. This way we were reading the notes while singing, playing recorder, and playing hand chimes. Here students are reading “When the Saints Go Marching In.” After I’d lead them through the music once, I asked student volunteers to lead it. This provided an extra challenge in music-reading and listening to these students.
Folsom Musicians 