Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Binding Books and Singing Solfeges!


A few weeks ago, we started a new semester in the Middle School! Students who had dance and drama the first semester have music and art now, and vice-versa!  

In art class we are currently working on a book making project. Students put together folios which consisted of five sheets of paper folded in half.  We then sewed the first to the second and so on until all five were together, and we had created a book block. It was a hard process but after a few slight mishaps everyone’s books were sewn together.
The next step towards making our book was gluing the spine together. We spread Glue over the whole spine and pressed down. We had to very careful not to get glue on any other part of our book. After that we left our books to dry and started to work on the covers for our books. We took three pieces of cardboard and three pieces of pretty fabric. We got two chose between a few differently pattern Sheets of paper with flowers and leaves on them. We then began to paste the fabric to the pieces of cardboard. So far that is how much we have done on our books!  We all can hardly wait to see how these amazing books will turn out and begin using them.  

In Music class we have been reviewing things we learned last year. We reviewed the solfege scale and hand signals (do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do) by singing the notes and repeating the hand signals our teacher showed us. In the end, our teacher surprised us by letting us know that we had just sung a song using solfege! We also reviewed lessons about rhythm and note reading. We went over how many beats each different type of note had. We also had a lot of fun singing and playing the drums to a Finnish folk song!  I can’t wait to see what the rest of this exciting semester in music has to offer.
-- Text and Photos by Emma B.