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Celebrating the U.S.!

© Karen Stafford

For those of us who are U.S. citizens and have to go to school past Memorial Day, a neat opportunity arises to keep that time filled til school's over with. There are several activities you can do to celebrate our nation's heritage and pride.

This page gives some terrific suggestions on writing a patriotic song of your own (or, in this case, the kids's own!). Included are links for research purposes on significant military and war events of the past 200+ years, a worksheet for answering questions, and a step-by-step guide to coming up with the song itself. If your school is participating in some type of Memorial Day activity, what a great place to perform it! Even during the summer, there can be performance opportunities at civic events for Flag Day or Independence Day.

Although this is not a lesson plan in a sense, it's really neat. The Lester Levy collection of sheet music has images of the covers and sometimes notation of a wide variety of original (and I mean ORIGINAL!) sheet music. The Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music is part of Special Collections at the Milton S. Eisenhower Library of The Johns Hopkins University. It contains over 29,000 pieces of music and focuses on popular American music spanning the period 1780 to 1960.

Get some words to some of the best known (and not-so-well-known) songs from the Fifties Web. Each song is played as a MIDI-file, but also includes the lyrics so you can sing along. Or, what a neat orchestration project. Take the MIDI-file, run it through a program like Band-in-a-Box or Freestyle and orchestrate or harmonize!

Planning some music to order for next year? Check out one of my favorite places Plank Road Publishing, home of K-8 Magazine. In addition to the bi-monthly magazine (just FULL of ideas and songs), Plank Road also publishes collections and musicals, such as their "America, My Home", and nifty raps like "Rap of the Presidents" and "Rap of the States". I guarantee you, most kids will want to learn these raps and not realize they're actually learning something else!

I'm sure, unless they've been in a cave hiding, your kids know the words to "Yankee Doodle". But what do all those silly words mean? The ProMotion site has a book review of "Yankee Doodle", written by Steven Kellogg, plus a very short history of the song. A fun activity for this song is found in the 92 edition of the fifth grade MacMillan series. Have your kids divide into two facing ("alley") lines, girls on one side, boys on the other (or, just divide into twos). On the verses, the lines go four steps in, four steps back, then eight steps in so the lines cross and trade places. Then, the head person at each line starts down the "alley" this way: gallop down four, gallop back four, gallop down the alley four. Of course, you'll probably have to play the song at least 1-1/2 times so everyone gets a turn down the alley!

The copyright of the article Celebrating the U.S.! in Teaching Music is owned by Karen Stafford. Permission to republish Celebrating the U.S.! in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.