Submitted by Jennifer Schroeder, Fall River, Wisconsin

Idea posted December 3, 2002

I've been using Recorder Karate since school started this year. The kids are loving it! There are a couple things that I'm going to change for next year, though.

I've found that the second song, "Gently Sleep," is actually harder for the kids to play than the third song, "Merrily We Roll Along." I think this is because "Gently Sleep" is unfamiliar to the kids, and the last measure of each line has a skip instead of step-wise motion.

The fourth song, "It's Raining," is HARD. Putting the two, eighth notes on beat four of the measures in the second line, along with a jump from E to A, is really, really difficult. The anacrusis at the beginning seems to throw them off, too, even though we've sung songs with them and discussed them and played them plenty of times before.

I'm probably going to modify the order of the songs for next year and either make "It's Raining" easier or replace it with something else. Otherwise, the rest of the songs progress really nicely.