Song and dance {Three great activities for your older students}

The week before last, I finished up teaching Level I for the Kodaly program at DePaul University in Chicago. My class had 18 music teachers, and they were a GREAT class…so cohesive and supportive of each other!  A few days before the class ended, one of my students mentioned that he couldn't find the song “Oboshinotentoten” on YouTube (as they have to check YouTube during the retrieval process for any versions of that song) so he suggested we make our own video. I thought this was a great idea, so we recorded ourselves playing the song, as well as performing two other dances!

Here is “Oboshinotentoten”:

…and here is the music (thanks to my friend Sue Leithold-Bowcock for teaching it to me!)

Since we were having fun recording, we thought we should go ahead and record the dance for “Sesere Eeye,” which is folk dance from the Torres Strait Islands off the coast of Australia. I learned this many years ago from an Australian teacher at the International Kodaly Symposium Conference in Columbus, and my students have enjoyed learning and performing it!

Here is the music for the song; you could perform it with a recording (many can be found on Itunes; this recording is by the OAKE children's choir and I don't think it can be found on Itunes) or you could have students sing as they dance:

One last dance we recorded was Dandiya Raas, a folk dance from India that I learned from my friend Meghan. The recording is “Chakkardi Bhammardi” by Manoj Dave/ Kishor Manraja/ Raghuvir Kunchala/ Forum Mehta/ Himali Dholakia, and can be purchased on I-tunes. 

Click here to read more about the traditional Dandiya Raas dance. This particular dance is done in an ABCB form, with A being the slow part (bend/ tap/ bend tap), B being step/circle/step/circle, etc., and C being faster (tap right 2x, tap left 2x, etc.)

Thanks so much to my class for being willing to videotape in order to share these wonderful songs and dances with other music teachers! I have done all of these with my older students (3rd-5th grade) and the activities are well loved by all!

Please comment below if you have any questions, and thanks!