Kindergarten students at ISB receive two 40-minute music classes every 6-day cycle with specialized elementary music teachers.
In Kindergarten, students explore their own voices, and learn the difference between the singing voice and other kinds of voices, (like whispering voice, shouting voice, speaking voice and squeaking voice). Then, they begin to work on matching the pitch of their singing voice with those of the people around them, through many singing games, songs and echoing activities.
We play many partner-finding games, and sing songs with actions or movement improvisation. These help build self-confidence, spatial awareness and motor control (And they’re FUN!). With each of these activities comes the opportunity to play non-pitched percussion instruments such as drums, maracas, tambourines, woodblocks, rhythm sticks, triangles and guiros, just to name a few.
Kindergarten students soon discover that music can sound a lot different ways – loud and soft, smooth or rough, short or long, light or heavy. We explore these musical elements through listening, discussing and moving to Camille Saint-Saën’s Carnival of the Animals. Creative movement is part of every lesson in Kindergarten, as students find ways to respond to music through body percussion, locomotor and non-locomotor movement patterns. We then progress to transferring body percussion to pitched percussion instruments (such as xylophones, glockenspiels and metallphones), and students learn to keep a steady pattern while singing. By the end of Kindergarten, they will learn to read and compose simple rhythmic patterns.
In Kindergarten music class, students are given the foundation to help pave the way for their musical learning that will follow.