Teaching Day Four: Listening Day

Happy New Year from Fourth-Grade me!

So, I had a TON of fun during this lesson. The week before coming in, I emailed the teacher to ask what she might want me to do with the students, and she mentioned that it might be good to just give them a lesson on some basic elements of music. I thought that a good way to help get the student excited about music, and to really tune into it, would be to have a listening day.

I started off with a little listening warm up. I clapped the rhythm of a few different familiar childhood tunes, and had the students guess what I was clapping. To help them along, I moved my hands up and down with the pitch changes. I believe I did "Happy Birthday", "The Wheels on the Bus" and "Row, Row, Row Your Boat." It worked quite well!

After getting their ears warmed up, I showed them a picture of me and my husband. The students in the class have been told quite a few times that I'm going to school to become a teacher, so I thought I would "introduce" them to my husband and what he is going to school for as a way to transition into the next part of my lesson.

The conversation went a little like this:

Me: This is a picture of me and my husband, Nick! He's a really cool guy.

Boy in back: Is he an NBA player??? (I love fourth graders, oh my gosh.)

Me: Not quite... but he is going to BYU with me. I'm going to school to be a music teacher, and he's going to school to be a movie director!

Class: Ooooh!

I then told them that we watch a lot of movies at our house, and that we talk about them a lot, too! And since I love music, and he loves movies, we talk about movie music quite a bit (this is 100% true stuff, y'all).

We then listened to a few examples of movie music that the kids might recognize...

(The whole playlist is embedded at the bottom of my post! These YouTube links are just a couple of the songs I showed them.)

While we listened to clips of the songs, I had the students think about and answer a few questions: Why do movies have music? How do different songs make you feel? What about the songs make you feel that way? How does one track differ from the other? What instruments do you hear? 

My goal here was to really get the students listening/ critical ears on. One of the standards for Utah's Music Core is "Listening: The student will listen to, analyze, and describe music." 

Along with this, I decided to introduce the students to some of the recommended pieces on the core's list (see previous link). 

To do so, I had the students do an activity that I did in my Intro to Music Education Class (Music 275). Dr. Broomhead, the resident music literacy/ General Music-guru, had our class listen to a few tracks of music as though they were "soundtracks". Our class of 20-somethings loved it, so I was eager to do this activity with the ripe imaginations of fourth graders.

I passed out pieces of paper, and had them fold it into thirds (one section for each of the songs). I gave them one rule: no talking while the music is playing(!) , and told them to write down/ draw what each of the pieces would be a soundtrack to. I had them think about things like "What kind of movie would this be a part of?", "Who is there at the scene?", "How are the characters feeling?", etc. 

Then, I turned on minute and a half/ two minute clips of each of the following pieces of music... 

... and then we talked about the results! I'm including some examples of the drawings/ notes here on my blog. Fourth grade is such a fun, imaginative age! I loved hearing what they came up with during class, and I loved reading their responses later as well.

Love this "Rite of Spring" response. 

Anyway, that's it for a couple weeks! There is a school-wide Geography Bee on Friday that interferes with me coming, and then they go off track! I'll be back in mid-February.

Thanks for following along on my adventure, everyone!

- Amanda


P.S.....

(If you clicked on the Utah Core link earlier, you'll notice that Rite of Spring is not on the list of recommended listening. I decided to include it merely because I was so intrigued at what the kids would come up with for this one, so I didn't want to pass up that chance to find out!)

Bonus: Here's the Spotify Playlist I used!