First Grade Blues Band Plays for hundreds of people at Street Fair!

We had our first real public "gig" on a public stage with a real backing band and we ROCKED it!

The Sunset Market is a street fair held weekly in Oceanside. The principal of our school (Garrison Elementary, Oceanside Unified School District) is Margie Oliver and for years she has had a booth at this street fair. The booth showcases the visual and performing arts that we focus on and she thought it would be a great idea to have us play at the fair.

We had just played two talent shows at our school and were ready to try bigger gigs, but this was no small affair. There were at least 500 people there and we'd never played for strangers before. In addition, we were playing on the main stage, and the house band had agreed to back us for our signature song,"Sweet Home Chicago".

Hopping onstage with a band of people you've never met before- in an unfamiliar environment with no warmup can be a daunting task even for adults seasoned musicians, so I was stunned at how well these students handled it!!  Understand, we'd never met the backing band until we got to the stage. As we were walking onstage, "It's a 1-4-5 blues shuffle in the key of E with stops at every turnaround" was all I was able to mutter, and it was showtime. They had no idea who we were. The girls could've totally panicked, but they shredded (note to old-timers: that means they did an excellent job).

Fortunately we had practiced for weeks, to the point where we could do the number in our sleep. Even so, I never expected it to go this well. I used to play a lot of clubs as a musician when I was younger, and I know from experience that hopping onstage in a jam format usually has mixed results, but this went off without a hitch. Did I say I was amazed?!!

Another thing to keep in mind, we have 11 first grade students in our band, but as this was after school, only 5 were able to make it. Two of the 5 students in our band spoke no English when they entered the class, and one of them joined us only three months ago, straight from Japan! How cool is it that they are belting out the blues in English in front of capacity crowds?

To learn about the academic value and pedagogy behind our work, see samples of our performances, and learn how we weave music into the teaching of reading, writing, and speaking, please visit our website Kids Like Blues.org.

Red Tailed Hawk Science in First Grade!

We took this picture of a hawk outside of our classroom today! 
We decided to use this exciting event to address the 1st grade science, writing, and art standards.

The CA State First Grade Content Standards require students to know that:

1. Animals inhabit different environ­ments and have external features that help them thrive.

2. Animals eat plants or other animals for food.

3. We can tell what  animals eat from the shapes of their teeth.

Having some close up pictures of this hawk enabled us to look it up on the internet using a site called What Bird.  When you go to the site it asks you a set of questions, such as what the bird looks like and where you saw it,  and it eventually helps you determine the exact species of bird. How cool is that?

Once we knew it was a Red-Tailed hawk, we "googled" that term and found a great site on National Geographic that has a bunch of videos, photos, and interesting facts. The video was incredible and the kids' jaws dropped. It showed a battle between a Red-Tailed hawk and a Western Diamond Back Rattlesnake! Click here to watch it. Books are great but seeing a video on a large LCD screen narrated with quality facts and information ratchets up student engagement and learning.

We decided to make a vocabulary list of terms that we'd be using in our work.