Teaching the Alphabet Dance

Today I spent the morning with a team of teaching artists for The Song Room. The Song Room will soon be publishing the resource I wrote for them last year on my Alphabet Dance project idea (which I also described in detail on this blog here, here and here, if you want to check it out) and today’s workshop was to introduce the project to the Teaching Artists, who work in schools across Victoria. The idea is that they will introduce it to the teachers in their schools, and we hope that its broad appeal will mean we start to see little waves of alphabet dances fanning out across the state.

You couldn’t ask for a better bunch of workshop participants! This group took the idea of the Alphabet Dance and made it their own. Basically, the idea is to assign a movement to each letter of the alphabet, then use these to spell words and create dances. I had  a feeling the Teaching Artists would come up with something truly original, and they didn’t disappoint.

They chose to create dances on a theme of Astronomy. We developed a chorus:

The stars [clap] and planets [clap]

Yeah, they’re really cool [clap]!

All claps on off-beats. We naturally fell into a side-step move while doing this, and a lot of vocal additions and embellishments (Ah yeah!… That’s right!… ah-huh, ah-huh…. Because the-… etc).

Then they created dances using the alphabet on the words Flash Gordon, Ziggy Stardust, and Battleship FTL-Drive. Huge commitment to every gesture. A drummer accompanying us, giving it even more momentum. It definitely showed the potential of the project idea. Thanks all, that was a great high-energy workshop!

The Alphabet Dance gets kids spelling out loud, and offers new motivations for thinking about how different words are spelt. I have found that children who are struggling with literacy get a lot of confidence and enjoyment with the Alphabet Dance – they are highly motivated to learn the different moves, and the order of the letters. There are lots of follow-on activities you can do once you have built an alphabet of moves – consider putting together flicker books that spell out words using photos of the different dance moves, for example. Of creating large-scale wall friezes of all of the ‘letters’, drawn or photographed, or sketched as stick figures (for those like me who are challenged in the visual art department).

Members of the Song Room (schools participating, or previously participating in Song Room programs who have signed up for membership) will be able to download the resource from The Song Room website when it is launched later this month.

Back to school

The teaching year has started in earnest. I missed my second week of term due to illness, but last week made a good start and with the teachers, have chosen some fun themes to work on for compositions this term.

(Check out The Language School tab at the top of the page to know more about the school I work in each week as Teaching Artist).

There are three classes, and lots of new students this term. Lots of new students means the median level of English language understanding in each class is drastically reduced. However, the good news is that a couple of the truly disruptive elements from Lower Primary last year have moved on to other schools, and early indicators are that we have three very happy, peaceful, functional classes this term.

Here’s what I plan to work on:

Lower Primary

The theme this term is on the beach and water safety. Fun! I do like creating music projects around rules and words of warning for this age group. A couple of years ago the theme was Germs (trying to increase their awareness of Personal Hygeine), and we had a lot of fun in Lower Primary writing a song with a forthright, sing-your-heart-out chorus that described how

Germs live… on your hands

Germs live… in your bottom

Germs live… in your ears

Germs live… up your nose

They loved it. We all loved it. But I digress.

Water Safety. The Beach. The class teacher I am working with is just fantastic, she has lots of ideas and keen to reinforce anything we do in music in her other lessons with LP during the week. I knew they had been looking at some picture books that showed the different things you might do at the beach, so we started with a brainstorm on What things do you bring to the beach? and What things do you do at the beach? We listed various useful nouns (bucket, spade, towel, sunscreen etc) and verbs (jumping waves, building sandcastles, digging holes).

We will use these words in a chant and a song, I think.

I also invented a very simple song that I hope we will use as a warm-up game. It involves turn-taking, and accumulating voices. It’s very simple, but sounds good.

Middle Primary

With MP I am going to work on alphabets. This is a project I’ve done before actually – the alphabet dance and using the letters on the tuned percussion instruments to spell then play words. I am planning on writing a book later this year so intend to fine-tune some projects that will feature in that.

The Alphabet Dance is inspired by a fabulous dance performance I saw about 8 years ago, performed by the Leigh Warren Dancers, Quick Brown Fox. I always say you can get your ideas for music projects from anywhere, and this performance was rich fodder indeed.

The idea for the Alphabet Dance is simple – create an alphabet of 26 discrete movements, one for each letter of the alphabet. Then choose words or names to spell.

The hard part is memorising all the moves. Last week we got as far as letter ‘L’ which seemed an excellent start. Past experience tells me that it gets much harder from here on in.

Rather than post information about how the dance is progressing each week, I think I’ll post some ideas about helping groups memorise things like dance steps or musical phrases. I think that finding different ways to repeat things, so that they start to go into the memory but the students don’t get bored with the repetition, is key.

Upper Primary

At recess the class teacher and I talked ideas. Sathy told me that the theme for the term is food, and Taste of Australia. The students will learn to cook some different recipes and be talking about different cultural foods and recipes in class.

‘Food’ is another rich topic. Sathy and I came up with lots of possible things to focus on:

• foods form different countries (my colleague Sheldon King wrote one of my favourite songs ever with some students at this school – “I come from China…. I eat a lot of dumplings….” It had a reggae feel and was very cool…)
• building chants or songs from the text of recipes (a bit like the way Spicks and Specks contestants have to sing familiar tunes to words from completely unrelated tomes – such as customer charters or car manuals)
• Measurement – using all the different kinds of measurements (cup, teaspoon, ounces, grams) that you find in recipes
• Actions into dance moves – using all the verbs you find in recipes (chop, knead, mix, stir) and performing them as dance-like gestures.

Lots of possibilities. I am most taken with the idea of the different measurements and creating a recipe from that. Maybe we won’t make ‘food’ our overall focus, perhaps we will jsut draw inspiration from the format of recipes and create a musical piece on a different theme, using those formats.

Warming up the groups

I haven’t invented any new warm-up games in a while. But my tactic is still to create a warm-up routine for each group and repeat this at the start of the class for at least 4 weeks. This is to give all the students, including the newest ones who have the least English, the chance to feel familiar and confident with each of the games, and so get the most benefit and learning from it. I think it takes at least 4 weeks for a whole group to reach this point.

Songs

Each class learns at least one new song with me each term. We tend to sing these near the start of the lesson, as a unified ensemble way to finish the warm-up section before moving on to the composing component.

Sometimes I teach the same song to every class, which means the teachers can then use it as a shared song in the weekly primary school assemblies. This term I am teaching everyone As I walk this country by Australian singer-songwriter Kavisha Mazzella. It’s a very moving, peaceful song, and they sing it with a lot of sincerity and expression. We often sing it at the end of term when we are saying good-bye to students who are moving on to mainstream school.

Otherwise, songs I am planning to teach this term include:

Little Sandy Girl ( a game-song from the Carribbean. I sang it to my nephew last week – changed the words to be Little Sandy Boy as we were coming home from the beach and he loved it).

If I had a hammer (60s protest song. It’s always a winner. I wish I played guitar a bit better as it really benefits from a bouncy, rhythmic accompaniment, and my strums are a bit on the wet, church-y side of things. Well, that’s where I learned to play guitar!)

Swing Low, Sweet Chariot (Negro spiritual. I really love this song. I have a nice 2-part arrangement for it that I’ll use).

“Gur-Lump” Went The Little Green Frog One Day (a song I learned from one of my nephew’s Playschool CDs. It’s a Lower Primary song and such a winner. They love the drama of it, and the La-di-da-di-da chorus, and it teaches them excellent ensemble skills for pauses and tempo changes).

Brixton Market (a colleague Duncan found this one and taught it to me. I haven’t used it before so looking forward to teaching it).

Linstead Market (another Carribbean song. They are so catchy and joyous).

That’s all I can think of for now. I’ll add more later.

Improvising, composing and jamming

It’s end of term, so time for a bit of a wrap-up of where this term’s projects got to at the Language School.

I started the term with an interest in developing some improvisation skills among the Upper and Middle Primary students, and developing music on Identity, that would respond in part to music the students would teach to the class from their own countries and cultures.

Lower Primary on the other hand were so crazy and unsettled that the focus was to get them to be able to play together, to follow some simple conducting signals so that they might experience the pleasure of playing in an ensemble. I’ll write about them in a separate post.

Improvising

This proved tricky to introduce in some ways, and some of this was to do with language, some of it was cultural, and some of it was to do with the way that student learning develops in Language School (ie. the systems that support the students to learn when they have very little language schools to help them). I discussed some of these issues in earlier posts here and here, so won’t repeat myself… in any case, as the term progressed, I found that the work we were doing began to settle, musically.

In the end, what improvisation do we have? In the Upper Primary piece, we have a drum part (played by seven drummers, so pretty loud! They are sh0wing considerable restraint, I have to say) which came from the young Sudanese girl at the start of November. I am guessing that this was a rhythm she knew from somewhere else. She has left the school now, by the way.

We have 3 xylophone parts, and here the origins of the parts are more varied. One part came from me – I taught it, and the student plays it exactly the way I showed her, and she seems to love it. Her friend, playing next to her, is envious, and has tried through various sneaky means to swap parts (to no avail). The friend, May, has an improvised part to play. I originally asked her to invent her own melodies, always ending on either C or G. The first week, she did this well. She was reluctant, but with a lot of encouragement, she gave it a go, and executed the task well. The following week however, she mutineed. She wouldn’t say a word (not in English, not in Chinese), and I wondered if perhaps she needed to withdraw from the piece altogether, so pained she seemed. This week, I spontaneously came up with a new strategy.

“May,” I said, “I think that today we should choose music for you to play, that you can remember. We will all help you make this. I think that will be easier for you than always making something up.”

May looked a little unconvinced at first (something of her usual facial expression in music, it has to be said), but a couple of other students surprised me by saying, “Yes, it is easier, I think. It is better.” So May agreed.

I asked her to play me (improvise – though I didn’t use that word) one of her melodies. “Start on G,” I suggested. She played a string of notes, I asked if she liked them, I sang them back to her, she thought they sounded okay, and I wrote them down on the blackboard. We did the same with a second melody. Of course, she referred back to ideas she had already worked with in the previous weeks when she was improvising. And her third melody was her most ambitious, with jumps and triads and a definite ‘hook’.It seemed like she was gaining confidence in the process, and her own contributions.

Visual cues (3)

I have written about visual cues for ESL students in the past – using a metronome to encourage a sense of pulse and ensemble, and floor markings giving student reference points for organising themselves in the space. Floor markings also seem to assist students in letting go of physical anticipation/tension, and assume a more passive stance, which made a big difference when they were having a try of the violin for the first time.

Today I have been working with SY, a wonderful early years educator and drama guru, who specialises in story-making. We are leading a 2-day Professional Development Seminar for primary classroom teachers. Today was Day One.

SY taught a warm-up game that involves each person having their own little mat to carry and/or place on the floor. The mats are about 25×25cm, made of felt, and in bright colours. She uses the mats to organise a class, and keep control of their movement, all the while giving the children lots of choice and possibility. She starts almost every lesson with these mats, and they teach the children an important kinaesthetic and spoken vocabulary for movement and working in open spaces.

We tried:

• Placing our mat on the floor and standing on it, ensuring we each had our own ‘personal space’ (measured by swinging our arms around our bodies like a helicopter, and checking we didn’t touch anyone else). SY: My students know exactly what is meant by ‘personal space’ and how to find it because we do this task so frequently.
• Walking away from our mat, but on a given cue (a drum beat) we had to run back to our own mat.
• Walking around the space carrying the mat – on heads/elbows/toes/noses, etc – and observing how this changed the way people used their bodies, and the beautiful, unusual shapes they created in the space.
• Placing our mats on the floor and had to assume different poses, within a given instruction from SY. A pose with your hands touching the floor; bottoms on the floor, but feet off; one hand and one foot only, touching the floor.

Many of these are similar to theatre warm-ups used widely, but the addition of the mats offers ESL teachers a lovely way of organising students within a space without depending on detailed verbal instructions. The mats can help build a vocabulary with the students – both spoken and physical – for working with their bodies in open spaces.

Melbourne Festival – reviews (3)

This was probably an ambitious thread to start. From now on my comments on the shows I’ve seen will be brief.

Daniel Kitson – C90

This was a show I liked a lot. Kitson is an engaging performer, weaving stories and characters and setting the scene with skill in this one-man show about a man’s last day working in an archive of compilation tapes. The set was gorgeous – a tall set of shelves piled high with tapes, and a ladder on railings that could slide along the width of the shelving – which Kitson did with much grace.

It was a heart-warming story too. At the close of the show Kitson reappeared to invite us to come to the stage in order to inspect the set more closely. The labels on all the tapes were intriguing and beguiling – suggesting love lost, hopes for rekindling, requests for forgiveness, tributes and revenge. Apparently the show tours no more after this Melbourne season, and the set will stay here.

Jerome Bel – The Show Must Go On

My favourite show in the Festival so far! The whole night had a touch of surreality about it, and this framed the show perfectly. The audience and their reactions to this piece (which starts with a darkened stage and a guy sitting at a sound desk down the front playing individual tracks from CDs, one after the other, with gaps in between while he took out one CD and put in the next) were part of the show. Very John Cage in that respect.

Melbourne Festival – reviews (2)

Last Saturday night I went to see the new work by Shaun Parker:

This Show is About People

I wanted to like the show – I really did. Lots of other people liked it. For me, however, it felt a little confused. This is a devised piece with the show created around the unique talents of the cast – and there was some great talent there. Bulgarian singing, a counter-tenor, an early-music duo, some spectacularly physical dancers who threw themselves about the space as if they were made of rubber, and a strong, striking set, representing a generic waiting area, complete with a ringing telephone, sliding glass doors, and a vending machine that spewed out two dancers early on in the show.

Many beautiful elements, but somehow it didn’t all gel for me. There was some rather earnest narrative and monologue about life and death; that at times felt a bit too heavy-handed and telegraphed.

Melbourne Festival – reviews (1)

In between rehearsals for my own show, I have managed to see quite a few others in the Melbourne International Arts Festival. Here are my thoughts (quite perfunctory) on the shows I have seen:

The Temptation of Saint Anthony

I saw this on opening night. It is a music-theatre piece in a kind of gospel-inspired style, but directed by Robert Wilson so with his trademark slowness of movement and beautiful simplicity of design. Musically, it was lovely. The singing was just stunning. But I found it hard to follow the narrative (the diction was often quite indistinct) and, being unfamiliar with the story, was not sure what was going on much of the time. A lot of the stage action seemed a little contrived, frankly. In my cruelest moment, the words, “A bit too rock eisteddfod” flashed through my mind. I felt a little sacrilegious at that, so banished the words (until now). The show felt like it took a long time to get moving. It was quite static, both musically and dramatically, for a long time. It opened with some some quite beautiful bamboo sculptures, both on stage and being carried by a procession of cast members as they entered the space singing. It had a strong sense of ritual and emotion in the opening, but then the sculptures disappeared, not to reappear again, and the pace of the show took a long time to pick up.

End of Term 3

Today my two primary classes at Language School had their final music lessons for the term, and presented their compositions to students, teachers and parents at the End-Of-Term Assembly.

We started off the day reasonably well, doing a run-through of the song I have taught all of the primary students in their weekly assembly (Inanay – by the gorgeous group Tiddas – on the Sing About Life album). We sing it in two parts, which they are managing really well now. It is not an easy harmony for this age group.

Then Lower Primary practised their question-and-answer music Can I have some more please? No, you can’t! They have riffs that they play on glockenspiel that follow the rhythm of the words.

They were so unfocused! We have had a few tricky lessons these last few weeks – their regular teacher hasn’t been with them all the time, some of the students who speak and understand quite a lot of English have been absent from school (thus depriving the newer students of peer models), and these two key factors have meant that the structure of the piece doesn’t really seem to have sunk in. At least, that’s how it seemed at this morning’s rehearsal. I felt a bit frustrated by the end. Was this project too difficult for them? Mel (Melbourne Uni work experience girl who is shadowing me on this project) agreed with me that it isn’t, or shouldn’t be, when we consider what they achieved last term.

“You dance good, miss”

Friday afternoon lessons with the secondary students can sometimes feel a bit uphill. It is the end of the week – they are tired, I am tired, and even though they are a wonderfully good-natured and cooperative class, sometimes we are just not at our best on a Friday afternoon.

Not so last Friday. We have spent the last few weeks building up a piece for performance that uses material developed through a few different tasks – energetic, syncopated rhythms made from students’ names; improvised riffs on the pentatonic scale; and drum ‘alphabet’ rhythms – as section content for a piece that I really like. It is a bit West African in feel, and we have developed words that we sing in unison with the main xylophone riff.

Last week we agreed that this piece could do with either a rap, or a dance section. On Friday we created the dance. A number of the students are enthusiastic dancers, so we started by sharing ideas for moves.

I should add here, I LOVE dancing. It is years since I took any classes (which I do periodically, for fun), and I have certainly never studied it seriously. But when I develop dance content with my students I always join in, and I always hope they will teach me some new moves.

Once we had a bank of possible moves built up I performed them one by one for the students and they voted ‘yes- keep it’ or ‘no – lose it’. Then we looked at all the moves that had got a ‘yes’ vote and decided together which order they should go in in the dance, and the number of repetitions each should have.

Musical Alphabets – latest developments

We had an excellent day of music lessons on Friday. The Musical Alphabets project is coming to fruition, and the performance piece is looking and sounding very strong indeed.

Here is how we are working with it:

We have a Chorus, which is first chanted, then ’spelt’ using the dance moves (BANANAS! BANANAS! I LIKE BANANAS!) and we have four groups, each with a different fruit (chosen by the students) to spell. (PEAR, ORANGE, APPLES, WATERMELON). We practised the Chorus all together, and arranged ourselves into rows. They then worked in the small groups to practise spelling their fruit word while the three adults (class teacher, Melanie the Melbourne Uni intern, and me) moved from group to group, offering encouragement and assistance, and keeping them focused on the task.

We experimented with a couple of structural ideas. I liked the idea of layering the different fruit words together, so that two might be performed at the same time. However, the students found this confusing; they felt much less confident about performing their own word if others were performing a different word at the same time, in the next row.

So we tried a different arrangement, where each word was spelt four times in a row, one by one. While the groups waited their turn they remained in formation and waited in ‘t’ position (crouching down on the ground, in our alphabet).

The final structure is in ternary form:

A: CHORUS (chanted 2x, then danced)

B: SMALL GROUPS (one by one, pre-planned order)

A: CHORUS (chanted 2x, then danced)

In an earlier post I was questioning how much of this task the students understood.