The Music of Our Backyard

This week in K-2 music, the weather finally cooperated with my lesson plans and we were able to go outside for parts of music class.

Kindergartners have been tasked with building their own instruments by EcoFair, and had their first materials collection session on Wednesday. Before going out for collection, we had a great discussion about kids’ hypotheses about instrument-making. Ideas about different materials were endless. One of the students’ conclusions was that they could use just about anything to make an instrument … except for poisonous mushrooms and fire. Priceless. Next week, we will continue materials collection, test our hypotheses, and perhaps investigate the properties of flutes. (Kindergartners were especially excited about flutes, perhaps because the older students have started working with recorders.)

Students in the 1-2 classes will be putting together a musical performance inspired by their backyard, to be video-recorded at the end of the month. We’ve already sampled some music and poetry inspired by other people’s backyards. This week we focused on gathering ideas for our performance and collecting sounds in our backyard. This allowed us to explore properties of sound, such as pitch, duration, and timbre. I also read the students excerpts from W.A. Mathieu’s The Listening Book and we discovered how our hearing is improved by closing our eyes. Each student got a miniature composition book to record his or her song ideas. Some students described sounds with words, while others wrote or drew the source of the sound, and still others used creative onomatopoeia. Many heard birds, leaves crunching, buses, their fellow students, and their teacher playing the recorder to get their attention :).