Today we continued with our music project, Exploring Rounds.

We began by recapping on what we did last week. We tried to remember all the musical terms we had used.

These were CHORD, OSTINATO, DRONE, IMPROVISATION, SCALE, RHYTHM and DYNAMICS.

We were set the challenge to perform a three part ROUND, accompanied by a drone on the chord of G. A ROUND is a piece of music in which two or more performers or groups start one after the other. As each group reaches the end of the music, they start again - the music going round and round - hence the name.

We practised the song Frere Jacques in UNISON (all performers performing the same thing at the same time), before performing it as a two part ROUND.

We then explored the CHORD of G. Each group was given tuned instruments which played G, B and D. These notes make up the CHORD of G. We then created a DRONE over which we sang Frere Jacques, firstly in UNISON, then in two parts and finally in three parts.

Mr Lloyd, our Music Governor took part in the lesson and then filmed our performance. We watched our final performance and were able to appraise and discuss whether we had met our SUCCESS CRITERIA.

Jessica ' Our start and finish was accurate as we all watched the conductor.'

Matthew 'We played the rhythm accurately.'

Frankie ' We kept to our parts well.'

Mercedes 'We came in at the right places.'

Ewan ' We listened carefully to each other.'

To improve our performance we could:

Louis 'We could make our words more clear.'

Charlie 'We could improve our tuning.'

Frankie 'We could include some dynamics.'

Watch the video of our performance later.

If you are interested in learning more rounds, here is a good website.

http://bussongs.com/round_songs.php