Journal 10

This week in Music 373, we continued learning more about adding music into storytelling.  What works best in a story telling activity is making sounds to specific words that kids would know and have them play instruments when the word they picked came up.  We also used garbage from our homes to make noise to a story which increases creativity.  We also learned about binary form from a song we play this week.  This is what we generally learned in Musc 373 this week.

During the week, we read the story "Chicken Little."  In this story, all the names were in bold and we had a lot of instruments to play for each of the bolded names.  The teacher would basically read a story while the listened for the names so they can play their instrument.  The teacher would also have to teach a beat to the students so they can learn more about timbre and dynamics from hearing all the different sounds.  Lastly, having a part in the story where everyone is involved in a "mini" orchestra would be a lot of fun for the students and learn harmony from the song.  This is what we learned from the "Chicken Little" music activity.

In another activity we did, we read a story about thunder and why not to be scared of it.  We brought instruments from home, such as water bottles, aluminum foil, and cereal boxes.  Whenever the teacher would say a thunder-type noise, kids would become creative and make their own noise similar to thunder so the kids would have an idea of what it is like.  Not only did the kids learn more creativity from this story, they learned a lot of social skills and such.  They learned about emotions and family, they learned counting, science, and physics even.  This is one of the other music-storytelling activities we learned this week.

The last big thing we learned was about binary form.  I forgot the name of the song played, but it was a pop-type song; we went into two groups in a circle and danced in opposite directions.  Binary form is comprised of two parts; A and B.  Part A is the chorus-verse and part B is the refrain-verse.  It is usually comprised in 8 measures per phrase.  Pop, rock, and folk music are examples of types of music in binary form.  This is all that we pretty much learned in this week of Musc 373.