Secret Songs

We used a number of lessons on "secret songs" to introduce the students to more connections between the rhythms and syllables of our songs.

The secret songs that I used were made up of songdots. When making songdots of a song, you place a dot on the paper for every rhythmic event in the song. For example, if I was songdotting the word "Sally" from "Sally Go 'Round the Sun," I would place two dots on the page. When I made the secret songs for the class, I spaces the dots out according to duration and phrasing. My songdots for "Sally Go 'Round the Sun" are pictured below, followed by the dots connected to the lyrics.

Sally Go 'Round the Sun

With Lyrics

This was the first secret song that I used with the students. To begin, I displayed the plain dots on the board and explained what they were to the students. Then, I tapped the rhythm while pointing to the dots. Afterwards, the students guessed which song it could be and we sang their guesses while pointing to the dots to check if they were correct. We did the same process on following weeks for "Bee Bee Bumblebee" and "A-Hunting We Will Go."

During this process, we focused a lot on matching the lyrics to the songdots. We talked about how many dots it takes to sing the words. We were able to discuss how sometimes words are split into parts, which is why it takes more than one note to sing those in these songs. The students were also able to identify how words in the songs were split up between dots.