Making Music at Ocean View!

Kindergarteners at Ocean View Elementary are making music!
As a mother, educator, performer and Program Director at Youth in Arts, I am thrilled to have the opportunity to play with our young students in Albany.  Students in every TK (Transitional Kindergarten), K and K-1 class at Ocean View (and the Albany Children’s Center) are playing, singing and dancing during our 10 week music program.

We started out exploring the many different sounds we can make with our bodies: clapping, tapping, snapping, sliding, singing, talking, etc.  Students came up with their “name rhythm”, making a percussive sound for every syllable in their name and we put them together to make music!  We have learned to warm up our voices with different sounds and practicing “solfége”, learning about pitch and volume.  We have applied this to singing fun songs about friends, movements, emotions.  I have caught more than one parent humming the tune to one of the songs we sing in class because students sing them at home too!
We definitely keep moving, dancing to the funky beat of my “cajón”, isolating body parts and moving to different types of beats. Students have learned about keeping a steady beat and playing different rhythms with their bodies and with an assortment of percussion instruments including shaker, rhythm sticks and drums.
Both of my children are students at Ocean View and one of the many beautiful attributes of our school is the wealth of diversity of our families.  In honoring this, we sing our “Hello My Friend” song in as many languages as we can! Students have taught us to sing it in Hebrew, Portuguese, Mandarin, Korean, Arabic, Japanese and Spanish amongst other languages.  We are also in the midst of writing a song about appreciating our differences called “We Are Different in Beautiful Ways”.
It has been such an honor to work with every teacher at Ocean View and witness how each one of them incorporates singing and movement into every school day.  Our students are very happy about making music and we are eager to share our love for music with our families and friends during our culminating event in April.
In the meanwhile, keep singing!
Nydia Algazzali Gonzalez
YIA Mentor Artist & Program Director