Music Team Sara Scalise, Seth Robertson, Tyler Patton, and Victoria Kapp

Bringing Music into the Classroom… Our summer goal: To expose children to a variety of instruments, musical terms, and concepts. To enrich their lives through music instruction and to encourage further independent music study.

The Keyboard During this lesson, we taught the children the parts of the keyboard and their names. We also let the children experiment with playing the keyboard themselves. To give the students a context in which to play the keyboard, one team member read a story while another played a song along with it on the keyboard.

The Tenor Saxophone Seth introduced the tenor sax by telling the story of how to came to own his own saxophone, which was by finding it in a dumpster outside his school. The kids really enjoyed this unlikely story. He went on with the instruction by teaching the parts of the sax, the part names, different kinds of saxophones, playing a songs, and letting the children touch it.

The Ukulele Sara introduced the ukulele to the children by playing a Pete the Cat song they knew and the F.U.N. song from Spongebob. The lesson went on with parts of the ukulele, names of the parts, different ukulele body styles, and letting the children strum it.

Other Instruments We also explored other instruments with our classes. Amongst these are: the banjo, bass guitar, french horn, and mellophone. We taught about these instruments by following the same basic format we have used with other instruments. We taught the different parts, the part names, how to play them, and different kinds of these instruments and where and what kind of music they would be used in. We also taught songs along with each instrument and let the children touch and/or play each instrument.

Create your own Instrument! We allowed the children to created their own instruments. To do this, they had to apply the concepts we taught them to draw a picture of an imaginary instrument. Once they had finished, they had to present to the class how each instrument was played and what their instrument sounds like.

Chalk Piano During one of our lessons we let the children “play” a chalk piano. We did this by using a piano playing app on our cell phones, connected to speakers. As children hit the keys, we would play the corresponding keys so that it was like they were actually playing the piano.

Glass Xylophone Composers During this lesson, we created our own glass xylophone using water and glass jars. Using different colored whole notes, we showed the children how they could read music by looking at each colored whole not and hit the corresponding jar. We then gave them a blank sheet of whole notes and allowed them to color or “compose” their own music and play it.

The Literacy Element