China Unit Grade 3

3rd graders have been studying China in their classrooms the past few weeks so I decided to do a China unit in music too!
Week 1 students learned a song called "The Jasmine Flower" and played an accompaniment on the orff barred instruments. We then talked about Chinese Zodiacs and played a zodiac movement game.

Week 2 we talked about the different aspects of the Chinese New Year, which was on February 19th, 2015. One of the popular traditions is to have dragon dancing on the streets on the 5th day of the Chinese New Year when people have to go back to work. We got to make our own dragon dance in class!

3P Dragon Dance. 

The song used is called "Chinese New Year" from Silver Burdett Making Music Grade 2.

3S Dragon Dance

Students then made Chinese New Year Compositions using different Chinese symbols and writing out the stick notation. The words they could choose from were dragon, lantern, coin, fan, and firecrackers. Find the composition templates in this very useful bundle here.

Week 3 class 3P learned a Chinese song and game to the song "Hao Peng You" and finished with a Chinese ribbon dance. Class 3S spent the entire class going more in depth with the ribbon dance and added instruments. 

The music used is called "Ribbon Dance" from Music Connection 2.5 and the movements were adapted from the routine in "Mallet Madness" to fit the music. The instrument parts were written by fellow music teacher Lindsay Wadleigh.

Ribbon Dance Routine

1. Large circles in front- 4m.

2. Right arm circles (forwards or backwards)- 2m.

3. Figure eights in the front-  4m.

4. Left arm circles (forwards or backwards) 2m.

5. Figure eights side to side. 4m.

6. Lassos just above head 2m.

7. Snakes (start with ribbon stick high, bring downward quickly zig-zagging) 4m.

8. Fire (ribbon stick pointing down, make very fast, small circles) 2m.

3P Ribbon Dance

3S Ribbon Dance with Instruments