First Grade Week 4 -- Imitation and the Orff Instruments

This week in first grade classes the students talked about imitation and how essential it is to learning music.

We began with a fun imitation song -- "The Cuckoo Comes in April" -- in which the students got to improvise cuckoo songs on the aerophones they painted last week.

Then after some review about pitch and vibration we moved over to the Orff Instruments (see picture above).  For those who may have not seen them before, these are the wonderful xylophones and metalophones Friends of Third purchased for the school last year.  As the first graders discovered, learning how make music on them is all about imitation.