This is Wen Ye writing.
I checked this blog today, and noticied there wasn't any new post on yesterday's choir practice, so I thought I should just write this post.
Benjamin, Benedict and Me arrived at GOS at around 2.30pm to set up the powerpoint slides and prepare for the lesson. Isaac arrived at around 2.45pm.
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The projector system was very friendly. It was direct input so there was not much trouble during setup. More importantly, I think the system supports audio, so it'll come in very handy when we teach songs that they've never heard before. By the way, we heard from Ms Phoon that the students missed us when we were absent during Cross Country, which is a good thing, because it means that they want us to be around and they are happy that we're around :)
We made some changes to the powerpoint to reorder our teaching content, but we were fully prepared when the students came in.
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Ms Phoon started the practice by measuring everyone's sizes for the choir t-shirt.
Once we got the choir members to settle down, I started the lesson with warm-ups.
We started with the breathing exercises, Dog Panting and Candle Blowing.
We proceeded on to Laughing is Contagious and Ma Me Mi Mo Mu.
We then taught them the solfege for Do Mi So. Basically, we showed them the solfege signs for the 3 notes, and I got a bit confused too, as I was busy looking out for any members who was not doing it correctly.
Before we continued, we rounded up the warmups with Hello, how are you, this time with solfege.
After the lesson, Ms Phoon pointed out that we should gradually introduced the solfege, so instead of making them do Solfege and Singing and Actions, we should introduce them gradually.
Then, we let them listen to the three intervals, Do-Mi (Major 3rd), Do-So (Perfect 5th) and Mi-So (Minor 3rd).
We then proceeded to have them listen to me singing Do, and we tried to have them to figure out what Mi/So was. Although the choir managed to figure the note, I suspect that if we were to try it in another Key, they might not get the note correctly, as the older choir members seemed to have sort of 'memorized' the upper note, rather than figuring it out, and the younger members just listening to the older ones and followed.
Now that we were finished with solfege, we let the choir members have a 5 minutes break while we discussed on whether we should modify our lesson a bit. (We didn't)
After the break, we started on the two songs, Bugles Calling and Grace Orchard.
For Bugles Calling, we basically wanted them to do the Solfege together with the song, but similarly with Hello, how are you, we introduced the solfege elements too quickly, and the choir members were unable to cope. Also, we also introduced phrasing marks, and crescendo signs, and this really confused them alot. As we have some leftover time this lesson, we will spend more time introducing new things to the members instead during the next lesson. Overall, we could hear a gradual crescendo during each line of Bugles Calling, and this is pretty good. Also, the choir members managed to breath at the right time too.
Finally, we did the Grace Orchard song, and we managed to fix the problems with the first two lines ( Grace being softer than Orchard) by teaching them about the decrescendo sign, and they got softer when needed, adding a sense of rhythm to the song. We also taught them how to pronounce the more difficult words like 'develop' and 'integrity' and 'humility'. Overall, quite good singing, and we will tackle tone issues and rhythm issues during the next few lessons.
Overall, this concluded our entire lesson, and if I think of anything more, I'll edit it in.
Next lesson will be taken by Isaac, and I have to attend to personal commitments next Friday.
I will be coaching Isaac next Wednesday, so that he will be well prepared.
Isaac: remember to drink lots of water, so you dont lose your voice. like me.
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Feedback was generally good this week, and Ms Phoon thought that we were very prepared, which we were, and I'm glad our efforts went appreciated. Overall the powerpoint worked well for us, and we're probably going to reuse it for the next few lessons. Saves us the time of writing on the board. One thing however, the powerpoint isnt as friendly as the board because my laptop isn't a tablet pc, so when we want to do annotations, it's rather difficult, and I was struggling with the annotations. I'm currently thinking of a way. One of them is to roll up the screen and write on the whiteboard with the projection, but we couldn't do it that day because we weren't allowed to clean the board. I've checked the glare of the projector, isn't so bad. We might test it out next week, if the students get distracted, then we'll not roll up the screen again.
Also, Ms Phoon pointed out that we can afford to go slower at some points, like the teaching of the solfege. Wenye already mentioned briefly in his post, I'll add on here. Basically, we're supposed to drill in the idea that if you don't do it well, we'll keep on repeating the same thing over and over again. Which might work, although I'm worried about the fact that our students may have shorter attention spans. Of course, we need to try this out, if the response isnt good we'll adapt again.
As for something new this week, we had a form of loosening up when we were teaching the school song, as in, they jumped up and down so that they'll sound more enthusiastic when they sung the song later. It worked, because they really sounded much more energetic after the moving and loosening up. I have half a mind to implement this in warm ups and every once in a while during the course of the lesson so they'll be alert and energetic throughout the lesson.
Finally, next week we'll also need to work on memory of school song, this week we did not have the time. I also noticed some of them said "love" as "ove" and "hope" as "ope" in the school song, I might correct it next week, or get Isaac to look out for that. We might go for a little editing of the lesson content, but that will be discussed on Wednesday, during RE.
That's all.
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[Edited by Benjamin]
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