Submitted by Sarah Burns, Girard, Illinois
Idea posted June 18, 2004
When needing to divide a class into groups, I used to have the students just number off. This year, I got an idea. I go around the circle and have the students sing determined intervals. For example, if I need two groups for an activity, the class would sing "sol-mi" (or any other two note interval) around the circle with the first child singing "sol" the next singing "mi" and so on around the circle. If I needed five groups, then we would sing the five pentatonic notes (Do-Re-Mi-Sol-La) around the circle.
In the beginning, it was the students matching *my* pitch, which became an unofficial assessment for me. Towards the end of the year, most classes could sing on pitch all the way around on the intervals.
If those students were unable to match/sing pitch, I would not make them try to sing it more than three times. Sometimes I found they tried to sing *with* me, which I felt showed they were not listening/concentrating on the pitch. If they didn't ever match pitch, I would smile at them and encouragingly say, "We'll work on that together!"
This idea has worked for me and also given me an opportunity to give each child a little individual attention to his/her singing voice, something we often are not able to do in the elementary music classroom.