Isle of Friday Afternoons

Isle of Tune is one of the best ways to let your students create music on their own at school or at home.  Simply put down a road, a few cars, street lights, houses, trees, plants, and voilà: they have created a song!  I encourage all of you to experiment with Isle of Tune for a while.  Before you know it, half of your day has disappeared creating music!  This site is so intuitive and easy for students pick up, that I have had many emails from teachers and parents sharing with me how much they love this site! Not only can you create songs, but you can also use Isle of Tune as a fun teaching tool.

Boom!

Behold! The Wall of Whackers!

Boomwhackers are great for the elementary music classroom, but they are such a pain to store.  For the past six years I have kept my large Boomwhackers in laundry baskets and my smaller ones in buckets.  It looked messy and was hard to find the tubes I needed.  I just moved to a new classroom with a very long, empty wall.  I knew I wanted to use the large space for a word wall (which as you can see is still on the to-do list,) but then I found this....

@IWBMusic

IWB Music now has its own twitter feed!  Simply press the button "Follow @IWBMusic" below, and you're all set! Remember, you can also follow IWB Music on Facebook and Google+.

Tweets by @IWBMusic

Kansas City Symphony Kinderkonzert

Photo credit: kcsymphony.org

I have the wonderful opportunity to take a grade level of my students to see Peter and the Wolf and Other Symphonic Tales performed by the Kansas City Symphony at Helzberg Hall in the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts next week.  Peter and the Wolf was one of my favorite pieces growing up, and I am incredibly excited to share it with another generation of young musicians!  The Electric Media Manager for the symphony is a good friend of mine and she shared a series of videos the symphony is using to promote the concert and to educate young musicians about the piece.  These videos feature an introduction by Assistant Conductor, Aram Demirjian and an explanation of each character's traits by local actor and narrator, Alex Espy.  The first video is an introduction to Peter:

Check out the KC Symphony's YouTube channel for more videos each day this week!