Why is it dark in the music room?

This week and last, we began our month of Author/Illustrator studies in Music. Our ordinarily light-filled music room was darkened with swaths of fabric hanging in the windows to set the stage for exploring the poems from the book A Pocketful of Stars: Poems about the Night, compiled by Nikki Siegen-Smith and illustrated by Emma Shaw-Smith. Again inspired by lessons designed by Orff educator Brian Crisp, the children first followed a beam of light with their hands and bodies, then later with the sounds of barred Orff instruments in our room. We then read the poem “Night Lights” by Michelle Magorian, and tried to use our conducting and improvisations to illustrate the poem with sound. The students had enormous amounts of fun conducting each other, and discovered characteristics of movement and the different barred instruments as they worked.

The image of a group of children moving as one and slowly stretching toward a beam of light was one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen in a while. I’m hoping it will be a lasting memory for the children as well as for me.