Ebony and ivory

A really hot day heralded the start of our week ‘Melody and Harmony’ in Summer School. We enjoyed seeing our friends and teachers again and spent a quiet morning playing on the carpet with Lego, dress ups, books and doing a jungle puzzle. Some of us dress up in the Imaginative Play area, every day. We head there as soon as we have completed our morning jobs, and take on our roles of choice. Today Hana was the sister and Lanah was the princess. Hana even stayed in her role as the princesses sister, when she went to work at the table with Shelley and then Hisami.

The first day of our week on ‘Melody and Harmony’ was all about the keyboard/piano. Many of us already know about a piano because Hisami sometimes plays the one downstairs in Buds Class and we now have our

small one which we keep in the classroom. We learnt the different notes; do, re, mi, fa, so , la, ti ,do and Hisami played them on our little keyboard. Hana knows them really well and sings perfectly in tune. We looked at the keys and counted that in one octave there are eight keys. These eight keys are white and there are also black ones; five of them. We counted the black keys and there are five. They make a different sound to the white ones. All of the keys are made from wood and the white ones are covered with plastic which is similar to the feel and texture of ivory. Long ago they used to use real ivory but they needed to get the ivory from elephants, which we want to protect. This is why they use

something similar to ivory and elephants can be saved.

We made our own pianos using a piece of white paper. We traced a black marker on the lines that Hisami had made and then cut out five pieces of black paper which became the sharps and flats. We noticed that the sharps and flats are in between the white keys so this is where we placed ours. We looked at the really piano that Hisami plays and counted the spaces to see where the black keys went. After we had cut them out, we glued them onto our page. We attached a coloured paddle pop stick to the bottom of our piano so now we can hold it.

In English we have ABC, in Japanese we have AIUEO and in music we have do, re, mi. Hisami

pointed to all of the notes and we tried to remember their names. We sang “Twinkle, twinkle, little star” and all of the notes for this song are, in one octave.

We played ten pin bowling earlier in the morning and at the end of the

day. We are quite serious when we play certain games and once again, had clearly defined roles; the scorer, the bowling pin arranger and the bowler.

At the other activity table, we sat with Shelley and gave her our thoughts about why we love our dads. We have made something special for our dads which we will take home later in the week. We spoke about things that our dads do for us and the things that our dads just do, in their lives.

We played a musical freeze game. We danced around to a CD and when the music stopped, we had to freeze like a statue. We played the game a few times, and at the very end, our instruction was to sit down and take off our shoes. The reason why we took our shoes off was because we were going to get ready to go and play outside.

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel