What do Music Students Learn from Recorders?
By Ms. Mauldin
In music, the Thunder and Lightning students have been studying to play the recorder. The fourth grade works on soprano recorder (smaller instrument, higher pitch and set in key of C) and the fifth grade works on alto recorder (longer instrument, set in key of F).
It is helpful to have the fifth grade experts that can give advice to the fourth grade recorder players. Here are some of the advice they have given:
- Your posture is very important. How you stand or sit will change the way you blow.
- Use a gentle breath, like if you are flickering a candle flame but not blowing if off.
- Listening carefully to your own sound really helps.
- Don’t get discouraged if you can’t do it right the first time. Keep on practicing.
We use the recorders to work on ensemble skills. It will take all of us to play with accuracy and clarity to sound good. A few overblowing tones can make the whole ensemble sound unclear.
We also use recorders to work on musical literacy. Over the last a few months, the students’ reading level has evolved so much.
We started by reading stick notation with positions (numbers).
Then we moved on to reading staff notation. First our pieces were short.
Now our pieces are a whole page long!
We used the skills we developed by practicing the recorders to compose as well.
We used boomwhackers, orff instruments, recorders and even piano as we shared our compositions with our class. 
We are adding one note a week to practice. By spring term, we will have a whole scale and will be ready to go to Carnegie Hall! We can’t wait to perform with an orchestra at the large auditorium at Carnegie Hall in May.
