Welcome to November! The Jam Cats November Theme is The Musical Alphabet, a foundation for musical literacy. In September, we made our own melody and used colors and pictures to identify our pitches. In November, we start using the letters A-G to identify these pitches.
Visual Craft
The concept of an alphabet being 7 letters instead of 26 is different for young musicians. One way to show the visual is to create a gear like this:
The gear keeps spinning and repeating the alphabet, never making it to H.
Every Day Reinforcement
Another idea for the music classroom is to create an alphabet wall featuring the letters A-G. Throughout the year, attach pictures that begin with each letter above the letters. Below are some examples of words you can add above your letters.
A — Accordion, allegro, acoustic guitar
B — Banjo, bass clef, brass family
C — Clarinet, concert, crescendo
D — Decrescendo, drum, dal sagno
E — Eighth Note, etude, electric guitar
F — Fermata, French horn, flam
G — Grand staff, glockenspiel, G clef
Videos
Be sure to check out the Jam Cats videos where we talk about different instruments while reinforcing the musical alphabet. Mr. Zack does a great job showing us the musical alphabet on the piano, keyboard, roll-up keyboard, and the Joia Tubes.
