Many of our Franklin students have been studying different pieces from Tchaikovsky's "The Nutcracker." Here's a quick update on some of these activities:
Kindergarten
Kindergarten is listening for patterns in the "March" from the Nutcracker. We're identifying an ABA pattern in what we hear and we're moving to show that we recognize this pattern. (Click here for a video clip of "March" from the Balanchine "Nutcracker.")
1st Grade
1st Grade is also listening for ABA patterns in "Russian Dance (Trepak)", and is using shapes to create their own ABA listening "maps." Here, you can see how some of us designed our ABA patterns:
Next, we choreographed our ABA piece of music, with the boys making up dance movements for the A section and girls making up movements for the B section.
3rd grade learned a little about the composer, Tchaikovsky, who was Russian, and students were interested in learning a little about the Cyrillic alphabet with the help of a translation website (below).
Cyrillic Translator (type your text in the box and click "convert")
We studied the "Dance of the Reed Pipes" with the help of a listening map, and then we compared and contrasted two famous performances of this piece, one choreographed by Balanchine, and the other by Baryshnikov (click on the choreographer's name to see each video clip).
