Even though we haven't been able to make music in the music room at school, a lot of students have found out that they can make some pretty cool music at home through technology. Before we ended up having to move our lessons to Digital Learning Days, the 1st - 3rd graders were beginning to use the iPads at school to learn about and practice composing their own short song for us to play on the Boomwhackers.
So here's a little background on the project:
​At the end of last year we took some time learning about different note values and we did some fun Boomwhacker activities using what I call our "Recipe Rhythm" words. We learned how different words can represent rhythm and we started making our own "recipes" with food words such as popcorn-lemonade-peanut butter-grape jelly to make a rhythm for example. We brought those words back into use as we started this unit on composing using the Song Maker App in the Chrome Music Lab (see previous post for more info on the site). I was able to demonstrate a few things about our project and each class had an opportunity to write a little song as a group before we had to take our learning completely online.

Over the past two weeks, students have been submitting and editing their creations that we will get to play once we get back to school! I wanted to share some of the awesome compositions students have created and will be adding to these as more are submitted.

There were certain rules students had to follow for their composition. The 3 most important rules were:
1. Each Recipe Rhythm word had to be used at least once.
2. Students were encouraged to use a variety of notes.
3. The composition had to start and end on one of the red colored boxes.

It has proven to be a tricky assignment for some without me being right there next to them to help them out. There has been LOTS  and LOTS of video feedback sent out to students!

Here's some of the excellent work I've received so far! I will be posting more soon...

- CLICK ON THE BLUE TRIANGLE UNDER EACH SONG TO HEAR IT -

The 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Graders recently learned about something really cool call Chrome Music Lab. It has all sorts of fun music technology for students to explore and experiment with. We got to explore a few of the apps within the Lab and will be using the Song Maker app to compose our own pieces of music with a little activity we've been doing called Recipe Rhythms. I'll be posting some of the student compositions here on the website so you can hear what great music everyone creates.