Singing Time: He Sent His Son

For the primary program we are doing a simple arrangement I came up with that includes piano and violin. We did it a few years ago in another ward I was in and it turned out really pretty. Check it out here.

Now, this is a way to teach He Sent His Son to senior primary:

Preparation:

• Print out melody lines of the music here, they are in order. Cut papers in half (17 total, 9 papers). To make it easier for you to know order you can make a small dot with crayon on corner of paper in rainbow order making sure to use light and dark colors so you have enough. Here are the colors I used:

• Draw the notes on the board (See below)
• With magnets, put pieces of music on the board in 3 columns. On left I put music where the first two notes go down. On the right where first two notes go up (there will actually only be 3 of these, I set it up wrong). The middle column has the first two notes repeated. Within that middle column, the three you see on the top are exactly the same (the first line of music is the one repeated a few times in the song). You can tell the kids those are repeated. Here's a pic:

Draw a sixteenth, eighth, dotted eighth, quarter, dotted quarter, half and dotted half note on the board from top to bottom (possibly ahead of time). Explain the value of notes. I'll start with quarter note is one beat and go up and down from there. Also explain that you hold out the notes longer for some and shorter for others (this should be easy for them to see when you write it out in the order stated above.

Also explain that when we sing songs the notes go up, down or repeat. Say that we are going to figure out each line of music to the song we are learning today: He Sent His Son. Reassure you will help them if they need it.

Tell them you will sing a line and one child will come up and find which line of music matches what you sang.

Bring a child up, sing the first line and have them guess! When they get it right move that paper with music to the top left of the board and have everyone sing that line. Do this with the whole song and keep singing the lines you figure out. Put music in order and tell kids to try to follow each note.

You can do this with any song. If you want to write in your own music here is the staff I made to write the notes in.

UPDATE! Now that I've done the activity here's what I'd do different:
1. Don't worry about explaining note values, only about how notes go up, down and repeat.
2. There were way too many pieces of music to look at so this time I would take the first two or three papers (of the beginning of the song) and give the child who comes up one of those lines to guess. This makes it so they are only looking at two or three papers instead of twelve. Sing the words to the two or three lines of music. Take the next 2 or 3 papers have the child guess. This will also help to get through the whole song. It took us 15 minutes to get through half the song. But the kids loved it!
3. Sing the part but then have the piano play it too. I started doing this towards the end and it helped.
4. I'd use this as a fun activity the week after teaching all the words to the song. Luckily most of the kids knew this song already so there wasn't much to teach but now I'm wondering what to do next week. It's just nice to have a game to play after you've learned the song :)