May Reads for the Music Classroom

With this being the last full month of school, I thought I would offer some suggestions on how to make your last full month a meaningful and memorable one with your students. These books are intended to help you celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander month as well as May 4th. 

Given that May celebrates Asian American and Pacific Islander cultures, I thought I would mention a book that talks about love from the Vietnamese perspective. In this book, the main character, a girl named Thu’ong asks everyone she meets, where do they keep love for others in their body-whether it is ears, voice, heart, etc. This is a great way to talk about love from a different perspective. When you are done with the book, learn the song that the author provides in English, and maybe even Vietnamese! 
While there are very few videos of the song, I did find one Youtube video that teaches the song in Vietnamese. You can use the melody to teach the song in English, and then teach the main Vietnamese phrase “Yeu men me cha” to the students since it repeats throughout the entire song. 

There Was an Old Astronaut Who Swallowed the Moon by Lucille Colandro

This is a good book to begin your discussion about space. I love Lucille Colandro’s books and this is another great one for a steady beat that also happens to talk about space! Use this to introduce your lesson on space and get your students keeping a steady beat while learning about planets in a fun, rhythmical way! The little old lady turns into an astronaut in this book, and swallows a star, a planet, a comet, a meteor, a rocket, and a satellite. Have your students follow along and then have a discussion about space afterwards.

​Here Come the Aliens! by Colin McNaughton

I first came across this book through Artie Almeida and Denise Gagne’s Music Symposium in 2020. Arite was doing a lesson on this book, and she had a song that she had the teachers play and sing every single time that she read “The aliens are coming!” I was inspired by this book and wrote my own chant to go with it. Here is some of the chant:

Have your students chant and move to this while they pretend to be aliens. For more information on this lesson, please see my TPT store-here’s the link.


Rapping Rhymes about Space by Thomas Kingsley Troupe 

​This is a fun title where students can learn about the planets through rap. This book covers all of the planets through fun rhymes that you can pair with facts about the planets as you are going along. There is an exercise at the end of the book, where you can have students practice writing their own raps about space. I like to use the software Groove Pizza to help them with the backbeat. There are many other lessons you can do with this software as well. Check out the Rap My Name Lesson and the Boom, Snap, Clap Lesson for some ideas.

In addition to these books, you can review rhythms using videos based on the video game Among Us. My students love these videos and they are a great way to review note values. Click here to get started!
​
Hope that these books help you celebrate May 4th and AAPI Month in your classrooms!

Only one more month left-we can do this!

Polina 

​