Birdsong Heroes and the Philharmonic's Family of Instruments

Part of our study of animal migration, plant cycles and climate change will be tuning in to the birdsong around us.  Kids already know a lot about birds and did some commendable impressions of birdsongs they'd heard in the neighborhood.  To expand our knowledge we are using some of the online resources that Cornell University's Lab of Ornithology has created.  The best is the Birdsong Hero game. Just try it out now; you'll appreciate it.

http://biology.allaboutbirds.org/bird-song-hero-challenge/

It trains your ear by having you match a song recording to a spectrogram of that song.  It was fascinating to watch our students use the multisensory information to break apart the bird song and really understand it on a deeper level.  There was a stimulating mix of musicality, curiosity, and meaningful challenge at work, which is the sweetest of sweet spots in the classroom.  If you complete the challenges online it offers a link to a download of birdsongs that you can use for your own birding purposes.

And speaking of training our ears, Wednesday, February 4th is our field trip to the Portland Youth Philharmonic's Concert for Children.  This is a free trip but we will happily take donations for later trips if you are able at this time. The program will focus on Tchaikovsky and teach us about the different instrument families: strings, woodwinds, brass and percussion.