Thunderbird House final Presentation

Our class and Ms. Cuthand's class took a school bus to the Thunderbird House this morning at 9:15.  We had to take off our shoes when we got there and found our spot at the table.  We hooked up our things like the Mac computer, the projector, the stereo and a laptop that belonged to Tricia Penner.

It was a bit of a long day, we had to do everything twice!  But we got to see different presentations from the other schools.  Norquay, David Livingstone and John M. King were there and they had dances, videos and shared their slideshows.  We say David  Bud there and there was a guy who played his homemade flute for us in the center of the floor.  At the end of the day we also saw Andrew Balfour the composer of Manitoba Fanfare.  We got to keep t-shirts and flutes and are going to go home to sleep!

Our Class Making Music with Garage Band

In our classroom we were making music with our instruments and the flutes we made.  First we practiced making sounds and wrote it down.  That is called 'composing' music. We had small groups of students together and we worked in the classroom, in the library, in the hall and used a computer in Mr. Cueto's room. When we were ready, we recorded our songs on the Mac. computers in a program called 'Garage Band'. Mr. Adkins helped us record on his laptop and showed us funky ways to add sounds and effects.   Some of us added loops which added other instruments and beats.



When we were finished recording and editing, Mr. Adkins burned us a disc of our songs.  We took them into the dance room and brought our music connection journals and a pencil and we listened to the different tracks.  When we listened we wrote down three different words about the music we heard. Then we role played a scence from track 8.



Our Flute Visit from Laura McDougall

On February 8th, we had a visit with Laura McDougall.  She was a musician from the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra.  She plays a woodwind instrument called the FLUTE!! 



Laura McDougall



We have flutes too but, our flutes are different because her flute is metal and ours is plastic.  Another difference is that she blows across her mouthpiece while we blow in.  She told us that flutes used to be made of bone and wood, but now they are made of metal because it makes the sound louder.  She told us about a flute made from platinum and it cost $50 000!! That is a lot of money!  She didn't use a platinum flute though.

A few other interesting facts she shared were:

-Seasame Street inspired her to play the flute when she saw a musician play on the show.

-There are four families in the orchestra;  the woodwind, percussion, brass and the string family

We have tried 3 out of the 4 families here at school!

She played some songs for us on her flute and told us a story about a man who fell in love with a nymph and she turned into a reed that he ended up cutting to make a flute out of.  The song was pretty.  We also listening to a cd with flute sounds and we compared it to the sounds of a bird.

At the end some students played a short song and then she played the same song on her metal flute! It sounded nice and a little different from ours.

Univeristy of Winnipeg visit

On Februrary 1st, rooms 17 and 21 crammed into a school bus and we went on our way to the University. The Music Connection program we are involved with planned a field trip for our school and 3 other schools. When we got there we saw a building that looked like "Hogwarts" school.  It was actually Wesley Hall of the University of Winnipeg.  We entered and had to be really quiet because there were classes going on. We saw some of the students and they were pretty tall.

Then we had to go to our first activity, we got a little lost but made our way.  We got to Pow Wow dance with Josh Letander. He looked pretty young and we thought he was tall and talented. He taught us two different ways of Pow Wow dancing, the boys' way and the girls' way. Some of the steps were hard. The boys were taught to "grass dance" and the girls were taught to "jingle dress dance". The music was good, we liked the beat of the drums.

After our Pow Wow activity ended, we headed down to the auditorium for an Art activity. We learned how to clay sculpt. The instructors' name was KC Adams.  We had to sculpt with our eyes closed.  Some of us found it hard.

After we sculpted we went back to the room we started in for pizza lunch.  We had pizza, rice crispies squares and juice.  Some of us recognized people from the other schools.  One boy in our class knew LOTS of the kids because of his hockey team.  Lunch was wild and we got pretty tired.

Our last activity was with Andrew Balfour.  He was a composer and he created a song especially for the music connections schools.  We are going to have to learn this piece on our flutes that we made. We think it will be hard and fun.  Mrs. Nelson can't wait to hear how amazing we'll sound.

Joseph Naytowhow visits us!

On January 25, 2012  we had a special visit from Joseph Naytowhow all the way from Saskatoon.  He joined us in the gym for an assembly and shared stories and a jig.  He made us all laugh and watch as the little kids acted out a story about a buffalo and a hunter.

  After, he came into our classroom and we did a Q and A.  We thought of questions to ask him and he answered us  Some of our questions were:

Q: How long have you been singing?    A: He had been singing for 39 years

Q:What inspired you?   A:  When he sleeps, songs come to him in dreams, when he's on the bus, different stories.

Q: How did you feel when you sing?  A:  Good

Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra in our school!

Can you believe we were so lucky to have some real life musicians from our city's symphony come to our school to perform specifically for us?!  There was a small group of brass musicians that played some musical pieces, old and new, in our gym.

When they were finished we were told that we were going to learn music on our flutes and the symphony would play with us!  This will be such cool collaboration.

Making our own Flute with a blessing from David Bud

On January 18 in our art room we had a visit from an elder named David Bud.  He blessed our flute material in ceremony that involved a smudge.  He used sage, tabbacco and cedar and spread the smoke over the boxes of material we later used to make our flutes.

We had a delicious feast of soup, blueberries, bannock (plain and raisin) and juice.  He told us if we couldn't finish our meals, we could not throw it away. He asked us to put it in a bucket so he could dump it by a tree, to give it back to Mother Earth.We have never done anything like that before.

We then had the chance to use drills to make the holes in our flutes.  We met Richard Dube and he played us a song and showed us how to blow properly in the flute.

Making our Flutes was fun, but then we got to PAINT THEM!!!

In art class we designed images for our flutes on a paper template.  When we were finished we had to prepare our flute so we could paint on it.  To do that we had to sand it to rough up the surface so the paint would stick.  Then we needed to tape our 'roost' to protect if from paint and remove the mouthpiece.  Ms. Ledger had stands for or flutes made of a block of wood and a nail.  We had to be very careful with them.

Once they were dried and finished, we got to PLAY THEM!!  We practice every day :)