Ep 9 – Exploring Pitch In Early Years

Exploring Pitch in the early years is loads of fun with these really accessible ideas! Learn how to make the most of these Take Note Music resources and engage your students in rich learning tasks where they develop their understanding of pitch.

Video Trancription:

Hi music colleagues.

We’ve developed some lovely resources that Take Note Music. That help your students visually understand the aural concepts in music.

We have the tower showing high low and the middle and this coloured tower is part of the resource kit one and is the resource kit one upgrade that you can get online or through your school order form.

The chime bar staircase is particularly useful for this high, low exploration. When we use the octave interval with the song up high down low, you can have a student playing a ‘musician of the day’ playing these notes, and you can have a ‘pointer of the day’, pointing to the high middle and low while all your students are engaged in showing it kinaesthetically.

Standing up tall, high middle on their thighs and low on the floor, so this would be how it would look for the first song that we would use for the beginning of prep. [singing] Up high, down low, up high down low, now I’m in the middle, and I’m going, and the students can all gradually get to sing that, then the teacher has their solo. And the students will orally decide whether it’s high or low, so the pointer will point up high. The musician of the day will play up high and the students will be going that high on their head. If all goes well.

Over time, you will see that more and more students are understanding this concept. I have my students for two 35-minute classes a week and so by the end of term one we’ve unpacked that up high down low song, and we’re ready to move on in the middle of term two to the next song which is the fifth apart. So now we have the interval of a fifth, [singing]. So the students are still using their bodies to show their learning [singing]. So the interval is thighs to heads, okay and then in later in the year you can use your So-Mi songs, and we’re up here. So this will be, and you just take off. And the whole idea of the ‘musician of the day’, the ‘pointer of the day’, is that the students have something to look forward to for their special turn. I keep it list and tick it off when they’ve had their turn, but it’s a great way to engage all students in this exploration of pitch.

On our website, we’ve got the song book ‘Catch A Song’ which has all our beautiful lower primary songs and games and that is a real bible. The other upgrade kits for levels two three four five, and they’re available on the website, or you can download an order form for school orders. So enjoy that activity, I’m sure your students will really love it. If you’ve got any questions, drop a comment below, and we’ll have a chat. Happy teaching!

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