Decoding the Star Spangled Banner

Okay, it's getting serious. School is starting in 1 week! Aaaaahhhhhhh!!! I am super not ready, I have so much that I want to do to set up my classroom still. I'm planning on doing some major printing on Saturday, so that will be a lot of what is on my to-do list. Tomorrow I'm going in to make some new bulletin boards. I'll try and post some pictures of them once they're done, but it's my first time making boards so they're definitely not going to be perfect.

In putting together my first few weeks of lesson plans, I realized that my second week of teaching starts with September 11th. I'm pretty sure that most of the classroom teachers will be doing some sort of activity in their class, so I thought it would be good to incorporate it into music class too. I don't have any real desire to broach the subject of what occurred on September 11th (it's pretty heavy for music class) but I thought that we could work on patriotic songs.

I'm going to be doing "Yankee Doodle" with some of the younger grades, having them sing and do some movement, but I'm going more in depth with grades 4 and 5. I find that whenever we sing "The Star Spangled Banner" during the morning announcements, the kids are super disconnected from what they're doing. Granted, that might partially be because they've sung this song approximately 1,000,000 times before, but I also think it's because they have no idea what they're saying! The language of this song is just old-fashioned enough, that the kids don't really understand what they're talking about, and therefore have no context to sing the song appropriately or enthusiastically.

So we're going to change that! We are going to decode the national anthem, and the students are going to write their own translation of the lyrics. Here's the what I typed up for them to use:

It's nothing fancy, but it gets the job done. If I was truly a good elementary music teacher, I would have some sort of adorable clip art and fancy fonts, but alas. The kids will live. :)

Anyways, we're going to sing the song, and then see if anyone know what it's about. I'm going to tell them the story of how the lyrics were written, and then we're going to break it down! The kids will each have their own lyrics sheet, and they'll write their own modern version of the lyrics. I have re-written my own version, which I will share with the kids, and I'm hoping to get some of the students to read their versions to the class as well.

The one thing I'm still debating about with this project, is what to do about the kids working in groups. I think that they will definitely get a deeper understanding of the lyrics if they're able to hash out the details with other students, but I'm worried that they'll all end up writing the same thing as their group members. I know that all of the translations are going to be similar, but I really want them to come up with the words on their own. Maybe I'll have them discuss in groups first, and then hand out the papers and have them write on their own. Yeah... That's what I'll do!

Tomorrow will be an adventure, I'm doing my bulletin boards (including Recorder Karate tracking, music class rewards chart, and composer of the month), then all of the music teachers in my district are getting together for a "meeting" aka a party where we complain about all of the time sheet madness coming up for the school year. Then Disneyland on Thursday. OMG! Yay! Piano Teacher conference on Friday, and then it's all down hill school year from there! :)