Gina Ali, Lower School music teacher

 A few weeks ago in kindergarten and first-grade music we worked on the holiday song, "Halloween Night."  During this time of year, we cover songs from a variety of traditions including Halloween, Dia de los Muertos, harvest, and more. "Halloween Night" is a great song, not only because the kids enjoy its spooky melody, but also because it allows me to integrate several topics into one lesson.  After learning the melody, we learned the musical term crescendo, which means to grow from soft to loud, and students practiced adding instruments that increase in volume. This required them to exercise a lot of control while playing.  Although the kids really enjoyed playing the instruments, the favorite part of the lesson by far was learning the American Sign Language to go along with the lyrics. Students learned the signs for "Halloween," "night," "skeletons," "witches," "goblins," and "ghosts." This led us into a conversation about American Sign Language, why it is so important to some people, and how it could be useful to others. Students became eager to learn other words in sign language so we each, including myself, took turns teaching the rest of the class other words we knew in American Sign Language. Some of the other words we learned were, "thank you," "man," "woman," "America," "good," and "California." Not only did students seem to enjoy learning the fun movements for each of these words, but they also seemed to really love the idea that they were learning another language, a language that could be used by someone with different needs from themselves.