Ideas From Friends!

Hi everyone! Cynthia posted this in the comments section, but I wanted to post it here so everyone could benifit from it.

Thanks so much, Cynthia for taking the time to post this. I hope more of you do so. I'll make sure and post the ideas as they are shared!

Here it is:

I am always looking for ways to engage the Senior Primary in Singing Time. In the last two primaries I've served in, most of the Senior Primary have felt either too cool or too self-conscious to want to sing. By the way, for reference, I am a choir director by occupation and should know how to get kids to sing! But I still find this difficult and would love to open up a thread/discussion devoted to Senior Primary Singing Time.Anyway, this month I decided to teach "The Family Is of God" and found a great way to do it. They memorized the first verse easily in one day and had fun doing it. I printed out each line of the song on a separate strip of paper (I think I ended up with 8 strips), with no punctuation and no capital letters. I mixed the strips up, then randomly labeled them each with a different letter. Next I cut apart the accompaniment, so that the music was in corresponding pieces with corresponding letters to the strips. I attached each strip of music to a separate sheet of small paper, to make it easier for my accompanist.Then I attached the letter strips to the board and asked the kids to put them in order. They had never heard the song before, but I did tell them the title. We did one strip at a time (somehow they guessed the first one correctly, though you may need to help with that!). When a strip was added to the song, my accompanist placed her music strips in the same order and she and I played/sang the kids creation (you have to know the song or read music very well to do this!). They then had the opportunity to decide whether the order was correct (sometimes the word order made sense, but when we performed it, they were able to hear that musically it did not). Sometimes it did sound right but was not, and I had to steer them in a different direction.This was a lot of fun and the kids got it right within about 15 minutes. Because I started from the beginning singing their creation every time we added a line, they heard the song repeated multiple times and were able to learn it. This also helped them to understand the lyrics, and to develop their musical ear.Of course, at the end, we all sang it together.Hope that's helpful to someone out there - I will definitely use it again.