This Sunday is week 3 into my Treasure Hunt Program Review (find more details HERE
) and we’re heading to Desert Dynamics! My goal with this stop will be to work on the dynamics of our songs. And again, whether you are doing the Treasure Hunt Review or not, you can easily use this lesson plan to review!
This week brings in a little bit of music theory – now, please don’t let the word “theory” scare you. There are markings on the songs that help us get more of a “feel” for how the songs should be sung rather than just singing them like a robot. For instance, each song has a describing word for how we are to sing them. For I Am a Child of God we are instructed to sing it “Fervently” (that’s written in the songbook just above the 1st measure). For My Heavenly Father Loves Me, we are to sing it “Expressively” and so on. When we sing each song, we’ll discuss what each of these words means with the kids and we’ll try to sing each song that way.
Then we’ll also work on our breathing (follow the punctuation by breathing where there are comas and periods – you’ll have to watch the conductor closely!). Then getting louder and softer as we sing each phrase. To help with the breathing and getting louder and softer, I’m going to bring in a slinky like this one here:
I’m sure Wal-mart carries them or check if your neighbor has one you can borrow ;).
Then to tie in my ship theme, I’m going to attach these little waves to the end of my slinky.
Print on card stock and cut out. I just used a twist tie and put a small hole into the image then tied it right on to both ends of the slinky. I don’t have my slinky yet but I’ll update as soon as I get it! Or just leave this off as it’s completely optional.
The slinky is going to help me create “swells.” When the slinky is held widely, the swell is deep and kids are to increase the volume of the song (I always like to reiterate, never louder than lovely!). When the swells come together, the swells are small and volume is to decrease. Volume tends to increase then decrease in each phrase. For instance, in the song When I Am Baptized, as you sing, “I like to look for rainbows”…the volume/dynamics should be increasing. Then they start to decrease when you sing “whenever there is rain.” repeating that pattern throughout the entire song. And you can breathe after the small swells. Clear as mud? 🙂
I’ve gone into a little more detail for dealing with dynamics in this post HERE
if it helps. I’ll be bringing a lot of these aspects into this week as well. Like I said in that post, the dynamics often times get overlooked as we are too concerned with the kids memorizing the words and being familiar with the melodies. If we really want to bring the spirit into the meeting (and have the kids recognize this spirit), the dynamics are a HUGE part of that!