Tuesday, March 3, 2015

These Jazz Men

Part of our Black History Month learning took on a musical note!  It all started by reading the children's book "This Jazz Man" by Karen Ehrhardt.



We have had this great book for many years, but this year we decided to find out more about These Jazz Men.  In this book you learn about nine great African Americans who were great musicians or dancers.  The neat thing about this book is that it is intended to be sung to the tune of "This old Man...he played one." We read the book, listened to some of their music, looked at real pictures of these greats, learned some facts about them, and even played a game called guess that Jazz Man.  The boys really loved it and it was a great way to incorporate my 2 and 4 year old in learning about Black History Month.  Here are the pictures of all the men we learned about...please ignore my blue tape :)



Here are a few projects the kids worked on to go along with our Jazz Men lessons.  Juwan, my 4 year old, (oops he just turned 5) started drawing this picture all on his own, without my prompting.  He knew his older brothers were choosing their favorite jazz men to write about and I guess he decided to choose his favorite also.  He drew this picture of Art "Bu" Blakey drumming.  It is a bit hard to see, but this is what he told me and I wrote it down. 



He is a drummer.  He would put his elbow on the drum to make a different sound.  Blakey played a song called "Drum Thunder."  I like him because he is a good drummer!  I want to be just like him. 


Brennan chose Thomas Wright "Fats" Waller as his favorite jazz man.  He looked at the picture in the book and drew his own version.  I thought he did a great job drawing.  He also wrote a few sentences on the back.  This is what he wrote.  He is in first grade and so there were some spelling mistakes and some corrections and lessons on some of the words he didn't know how to spell.



He plays the peano.  He maks faces when he plays the ivories.  I chose Waller because I think a piano is cool!

Samuel also wrote about his favorite Jazz Man.  He chose Bill "Bojangles" Robinson.  This was a very educational time for Samuel because not only did he have to do research, but he had to chose what information to include, how to organize his thoughts, and to type it all out.  He also chose a picture of Robinson to use.  This took a bit of time and it was kind of learn as you go. We talked about how good writing has an introduction and a closing.  He also learned that both need to grab the readers attention. So, for the caption of the picture, the introduction, and the closing we looked at different options together.  Some of these included quotes, stories, jokes, quotes about Robinson etc.  So with that said, he chose what he wanted for his paragraph.  I think he did a great job and he really enjoyed researching and learning new information he did not know about Robinson.

1 comment:

Jen said...

I think I could learn a lot from you about jazz!