Tag: teaching music

This week in music class, we toured the music of the nearest indigenous peoples to Antarctica. I created a tour for the students to explore the music of the Māori, Palawa, Noongar, Xhosa, Khoekhoe, Selk’nam, and Yaghan people. We reviewed the information related to Pangea, so that students could see that Antarctica used to be attached to other countries and continents.

In addition to listening to traditional music of these cultures, we learned facts about the people and looked at some of their artwork and symbols. The students were fascinated!

I had the students write one measure of music to reflect the style of music they enjoyed the best on the tour. They then decorated their music with the symbols and artwork of their chosen culture. I originally thought the students would use the 5 lines for composing their measure of music, but so many of the students really enjoyed the music of many cultures and turned their five lines into music from their 5 favorite cultures!

After the compositions were complete, I hung them all up in the hallway creating an artistic mosaic of the cultures we toured.

Today was an interesting day, as we had the local news channel come in to observe how the students and I were making use of the Antarctic expedition. They had been in before I left, and were now doing a follow-up, which was great to be able to feature the students!

For today’s lesson, the students were going to take full-length recordings I had made on my expedition, trim them to isolate one sound and then create a beatbox-type composition from a collection of isolated sounds. Older students did this using an online-based platform found at audiomass.co, and worked individually. Younger students participated in this by composing the groove as a full class – each student picking out which sound they want to add next. I pre-isolated those sounds for them, and then we slid them in place using my iPad with GarageBand. This allowed us to drag and drop the sounds into our timeline until every student had gotten to pick out a song.

We talked a lot about repetition, and watched Pentatonix for a sample of real beatboxing in action. We also watched a video on YouTube called “Animal Beatbox,” where a collection of animal names are repeated to solidify the groove.

Students had a lot of fun with this, and surprisingly, the youngest students were actually the best at making the grooves, as they enjoyed the repetition of picking the same sound as their friend did earlier!

Our younger students are learning about high and low notes and the shape of music. To practice this, I let each student in grades PreK-4th grade pick out an iceberg photo that I took on my expedition. They then had to create music in the shape of the iceberg – the music needed to go up when the shape of the berg went up, and down when the iceberg sloped downward. We then hung up our work in the hallway, with QR codes so that people can listen to them.

I’ve had students write words down after each lesson to see what lasting effects Antarctica is having on them. I created this word cloud to show how they’re doing. You’ll have to excuse the word ‘bear’ that shows up, as the students were talking about whether they could bear the isolation….they do know there aren’t polar bears in the Antarctic! I’m hoping to see how this word cloud changes as we continue our learning throughout the rest of the year!

While I was out of town for my Fulbright Global Symposium, the students got to take the data they had collected on the weather in Wisconsin and combine it with the observations I had made while in Antarctica.

This idea came from the craft concept of Temperature blankets, where people will crochet or knit a row onto a blanket representing the high temperature of the day for a full year. By the end of the year, they have a 365-row blanket that depicts the temperatures in their location throughout that entire year. They are very unique, and often quite beautiful!

I created a chart for students to be able to compare their temperatures to in order to assign the correct notes and rhythms for the weather they had. They were also required to pick out an instrument that represents our state, school, or the student personally.

I then shared my data with them and they had to plot this onto a duet part to accompany their weather melody. They had to pick out an instrument that represented Antarctica.

When I talked to the students about how the lesson went, they were surprised by the number of times that they were cooler in Wisconsin than I was in Antarctica. They also were impressed by the wind speeds I experienced.

The weather musical composition wasn’t always pretty sounding, either, as we were often similar enough in temperature that musical dissonance occurred. We talked about why that dissonance happened, and now they realized that dissonance can be a useful compositional technique, as we explored why a composer would choose to put dissonance into his/her compositions.

Our next great water/music adventure involved students learning about instruments that music use of water to create their sound. We studied things like Benjamin Franklin’s armónica, crystal glasses filled with water, Chinese water bowls, the Zadar Sea Organ (in Croatia), the water gong, Benin Water Gourds, Norwegian Ice Instruments, and watched the STOMP video where they are standing in water raising and lowering pipes to bend the pitch. We watched a physics demonstration about the resonance of a glass tube, and how the quantity of water really matters when trying to get the best sound. We discussed how there are really four different ways to make sound in instruments – blowing, shaking, striking, and scraping.

Now came the fun part – students (preK-8th grade) were given the opportunity to take on an instrument design challenge where they had to create a new instrument that used water. I made them another wonderful Antarctic saltwater blend, as I knew some of them would wonder if their instruments sounded different with saltwater vs. freshwater (they have gotten very good with curiosity and experimentation, and I encourage such behavior in class!!!)

It was really fun for students to create, test, modify, recreate….and then they got the opportunity to perform on their instruments for the classmates. They loved performing with the VR headsets again, as I gave them the option to perform on the water or ice of Antarctica again.

The next adventure the students and I embarked on was an up-close study of sound waves. Anyone who knows me, knows this is my passion! I have loved sound waves and all of the nitty-gritty physics of sound waves ever since my dad took me into his work when I was younger and showed me an oscilloscope. Then, in high school, I did my entire final physics project on the physics of music (this may have been a ploy to get to play with my dad’s oscilloscope again). Fast forward to my masters program where my final project was on tuning of all band instruments and how that relates to the physics of what’s going on with the ‘waves’ you hear when you are out of tune (another excuse to play with the oscilloscope!).

The students got to see sprinkles dance on a cup covered with plastic wrap, feel vibrations on crash cymbals, see vibrations when a violin string is plucked, experiment with putting tuning forks in water, checking out Kundt’s tubes when instruments play into them, discovering the beautiful artwork created by sound on chladni plates, and look at their voices on an oscilloscope.

We then compared what we could see about sound waves with what we knew about ocean waves. I showed the students videos of the Drake Passage crossing we did, and students enjoyed imagining themselves on a ship in those waves.

Our next project was another fun one. Students of all ages had the opportunity to paint to music. We listened to Ralph Vaughn Williams’s “Sinfonia Antarctica,” which he composed for a film on Robert Falcon Scott’s disastrous expedition. I did not tell the students what the music was written for at first, as I wanted them to decide what they thought Vaughn Williams was trying to tell us about his music.

While I was in Antarctica, I had the opportunity to kayak in the Weddell Sea. When I was out kayaking, I took out my Vernier water sensors, and tested the Weddell Sea. One of the measurements I took was the salinity (or saltiness) of the water. With that data, I was able to make my own saltwater that matched the salinity of the water I was in for the students to use when they did some watercolor painting to “Sinfonia Antarctica.”

Students listened to Ralph Vaughn Williams’s piece, and created a painting to match what they heard through his music. Before we listened to the recording, we looked at famous artwork that was influenced by the water – such as Claude Monet’s “Impression: Sunrise,” Katsushika Hokusai’s “The Great Wave Off Kanagawa,” and Georgia O’Keefe’s “Blue Wave Maine,” among others. Students were then inspired to make their own art while listening to “Sinfonia Antarctica.” I was impressed by how many students heard moments that made them think of giant waves, shipwrecks, and other dark moments on that water.

It was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed collaborating with our school’s fantastic art teacher in planning the painting portion of the lesson! I hung up every student’s artwork in our hallway so that everyone visiting our school can see the work our students did!

Welcome to 2025! Now that our Christmas concert is in the books, and Christmas break has come and gone, it’s time to get rolling on some of our Antarctic work in the classroom! After our concert was over, we did our explorer photos in my orange parka, and I’ve got pictures of the students in the landscape pictures I took while on my expedition. Now it’s time to dig into the serious work!

The first project we’ve worked on is the study of sea chanteys. Our spring concert is going to be water-themed, and this is the start of the journey. I introduced students to #ShantyTok on TikTok, and we watched a few epic performances. The students then went on a tour of sea chanteys from around the world. We even watched a short clip from “Big Bang Theory,” where Sheldon and Penny were using a sea chantey to complete a task. Students then deduced the purpose of sea chanteys.

Once we figured out the purpose of the sea chantey, students got into groups to create their own sea chantey. They had to write it about an activity that is not enjoyable, goes on too long, or something they have to do often. Once they got done, they performed their sea chantey for the class while wearing VR headsets. I had recorded several 360-degree videos on my expedition, so students were able to perform their sea chanteys ‘at sea in Antarctica.’ Due to most of the students not having experience with VR, I did not have them perform while watching Drake Passage crossing footage!

The littlest students worked as a full class to write ONE sea chantey, and then got to create their own composition using Google Arts Paint With Music (Ocean setting).

The students really enjoyed the unit (more than I thought), and I don’t think it was all because of the virtual reality – they really got into sea chanteys!