Composing with the musical alphabet (again)

For the first four weeks of term I took on some extra classes at MELS (the Language School), teaching three of the secondary classes. With one, I decided to revisit a project I have done before, where the students and I brainstorm all the words we can spell with the letters A to G (the white notes of the musical alphabet – see here for a comprehensive list of possible words). I then asked them to string two or three of the words together to make a melodic phrase. This is an interesting task for English Language Learners, as they get to transfer their emerging written-language knowledge into the music classroom.

I then helped them arrange these different melodic phrases into a structure, worked out some suitable accompanying chords on the guitar, their class teacher wrote some (nonsensical, but fun) lyrics, and we had a song!

Here is some of our brainstorming:

Music and literacy

I thought I’d write about one of the newest students in the Lower Primary class at Language School. His name is Marko (a pseudonym). He’s from Eastern Europe. He is bright, funny, and has an impish mischievousness about him in music class. He is also  notably articulate, which is an unusual thing to say about a new student.  But Marko’s oral language is highly developed. He has already spent some time in a mainstream school before coming to Language School.

Today the Lower Primary students worked on glockenspiels. They invented little four-beat melodies choosing from three different pitches. They worked all together, playing through these tunes slowly. I noticed Marko seemed to be struggling, which surprised me, because he has been so very bright in all the classes. I went to help him. I pointed to the letter names written on the board, and said them out loud for him. I noticed that he needed to look at the board before playing the next letter. Look up, look down, locate, play. Look up, look down, locate, play. That was fine – most of the students start like this, but then they begin to process the pattern, they memorise it, and can play more fluently. Marko didn’t seem to be sure about which letter was which without comparing it to the letter-shapes on the board.

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 square one

I had a challenging day at the Language School this week. Each class presented me with situations that required more patience and open-mindedness than I was expecting, so the next few posts will try to examine what happened, and what the learning is. This post focuses on Lower Primary, the chaos that we experienced, and observations on individual student needs, and strategies to help new students make sense of what is going on.

With all three classes that I teach there, there has been a big influx of new students. This creates a kind of instability/transition in any classroom, but the impact in Language School is even more dramatic because it drastically shifts the balance between those in the class who have already established some English language skills,  and are familiar with the classroom routine, and those who have neither language skills, nor an understanding of how school works.

Reflections on interviewing children

I interviewed three children for my Masters Research project. There were a number of challenges with this:

• They are all ESL students; that is, they are only just learning English. Some are not literate. Each has a different level of confidence with spoken English.
• This meant I decided to include interpreters in the interviews. Two of the interpreters were already present in the school, as Teacher Aides, so are familiar to the students. One student had to work with an outside interpreter that I hired for the project.
• Despite the presence of the interpreters, I wanted to engage the students as directly as possible with my questions, so tried to develop interview designs that incorporated visual elements, and put less emphasis on spoken language.
• One student spoke several languages already – one at home with her family, and another that she had used in school, in her second country. Her spoken English is apparently now more comfortable to her than her ’school’ language. (According to the literature I have read, this is not uncommon – there is a point in language learning for children where the new language that is typically used everywhere except in the home, becomes more comfortable than the mother tongue, used only in the home). However, the language she spoke at home is still apparently her most comfortable language. Therefore, I arranged for her to have an interpreter for her ‘home’ language present. In the end though, she spoke mostly in English in the interview. The interpreter was very helpful in ensuring she understood the questions.
• The child who worked with the outside interpreter was incredibly nervous in the interviews – so much so that sometimes her whole body trembled. She smiled and laughed the whole time and was happy to continue, but she was clearly nervous. I don’t know if this was because of the outside interpreter, or because of the interview context, or becuase of something in the way I had set up the room, or simply that, as quite a shy girl who is quite quiet, she was just reacting to the strangeness of it all. If there had been more time between interviews, I think I would have been able to process this discomfort more, and perhaps explored some other options that she might feel more comfortable with. But the relentless time-span I had to work with made any kind of reflection very difficult. This is probably a significant weakness in my research design, but one I had very little control over.

Not all of my visual tasks worked well. Some took a little too long, for example. Here is a summary:

In the first interview, the children came with a drawing they had prepared earlier, that showed a music lesson here, compared with amusic lesson in their home country. We used these picures to compare their experiences, and to help me get a sense of the context in which they would speak about the music activities they do with me.

Completing the ‘Aranea’ project

Students in Upper Primary also completed their composition project this term, performing a sequence of four compositions that told the story of ‘Aranea’ (by Jenny Wagner) in music and words.

This project ended up being fairly complex. We had to cut it down for the Refugee Week performances at Federation Square, unfortunately, but performed it in full at the school concert the following week.

We divided the story into four main sections: Aranea safe and happy, building her web; the Terrible Storm, that destroys her home and forces her to flee; her first place of safety, in the White Room, where she still feels that she could be in danger; and her eventual Return to the Garden, and rebuilding her life and her home.

The book is not (as far as I am aware) written as a metaphor for a refugee experience, but I like it for this. WE never made the parallels explicit for the students. However, throughout the term in their classroom work, the Upper Primary students were already exploring ways of telling their own journey stories, and so the music project provided a further backdrop to this.

The opening and final pieces were songs. The first had the class divided into two groups, playing contrasting instruments. The instrument groups alternated between verse and chorus. We wrote the words for the song in part by summing up the first part of the book, in our own words, and in part by quoting directly from the text.

Aranea, spinning and spinning. Living in the curl of a leaf in the tree.

She is safe and happy. She makes a spider’s web.

First the crosspiece, then the frame. Around in a spiral and back again.

The Storm music grew from our work the previous term. It created interesting rhythmic layers by working with chants and phrases drawn from the text in the book. It is a technique I use a lot, and I find it very effective with ESL students.

The White Room was my favourite piece of music – one of the most interesting and dramatic pieces of music I think I have ever written with a group of students. We wanted to depict the fear the spider was feeling in an unfamiliar and hostle space – even though in theory, she was now ’safe’, in that she was sheltered from the storm.

We created an eerie soundworld using high pitched violin harmonic, long and constant, and harsh. Several students dragged a metal triangle stick around the rim of a cymbal. Another student played a triangle, but gripped it very tightly so as to thoroughly dampen its resonance, and jiggled her stick at high speed in one of the lower corners of the triangle. It sounded like teeth chattering.

The remaining students stood in formation, heads bowed, and hands gripped into frightened fists. On a cue they began a slow stamp, in unison. Then cried out the following:

Scared.

Nervous.

Lonely.

Outside.

Her heart is running very fast.

[The rhythm of the phrase echoed by drums, shockingly loud, like gunfire]

She can’t hide anywhere. PEOPLE COULD COME AND KILL HER!

[The syncopated, uneven rhythm of this last phrase is then played by all the metal instruments, struck hard, with full damping]

The music for The White Room had extraordinary emotional impact. It was intense. The children performed it with utter conviction. I am not sure I have made anything like it before. It lasted only about a minute and half.

We closed with a song, more upbeat, but still with a slight dark edge to it. It included chanted sections, sung sections, and a body percussion accompaniment.

She goes outside, she finds her leaf, and remembers what happened.

She is so tired! But when she sleeps, she dreams about the storm.

Now she makes her web. Now she catches food. Everything is better now.

She has a new life, safe and happy, she has a new life, safe and happy.

The storm is gone, the sun is coming out,

And she will live in her leaf in the tree.

Remember they wrote these words. I prompted them with questions (such as, “how is the spider feeling?”), but the song is made up of their responses. I find the observation that ‘when she sleeps, she dreams about the storm’, very poignant.

It was a long term (literally – 12 weeks, instead of 10), and while I never intended this project and the others to get quite so complex, they did become very involved. But there was a huge satisfaction for all of us, I think, in realising these projects, to start with just an idea, and a book, and each week to develop new material. At the time of creating the new material, I suspect many students don’t really know what is going on. What I hope, however, is that by the end of term, when they perform their music, they will remember how it cam to be, and remember that they were all involved in making it, step by step.

Next term – no plans as yet! But hopefully something a little more low-key!

Mid-term observations

This week is the midpoint of the term, so it is a good time to reflect on where each of the classes are up to at the Language School, and what kinds of adjustments I am making.

Upper Primary

We are composing music inspired by the book Aranea by Jenny Wagner (illustrations by Ron Brooks). The students have responded enthusiastically to the book – it was a suggestion of mine, and the class teacher didn’t know the book at all. She too has responded enthusiastically.

This teacher is very collaborative. She has enlarged pages from the book to make a giant-sized book to use when the class reads together. She has taken words and phrases from the book, and from the words we have developed for our music, to use in the students’ weekly literacy tasks. This week, she photographed each student playing the xylophone and asked the students to write about the photo of themselves as a creative writing task.

2nd last day at the Language School

I worked out today that I only have one day left to teach at the Language School this term, and that will be taken up with a performance at Federation Square with the Upper Primary students.

I’m finishing term early because of my overseas travel (less than three weeks to go – yay!) but it has been a patchy term anyway, due to the Hunger and Musicircus  performance week taking up so much time. Then, the week following that one, I called in sick, exhausted and with a cold gearing up to invade my head. The students have therefore only seen me three times (including today) this term.

Well, we had a great day. The projects based on books have been embraced by the students and teachers, and in my absence a lot of work has been done. Here’s a summary:

Middle Primary have memorised their ‘colours’ song. We made this through a very organic and literacy-focused process – in Week 1 we developed some chants by string students’ names together in combinations that made interesting rhythms. We practised saying the phrases rhythmically, then the rhythms evolved into simple melodic phrases. In Week 2, we listed all the different colours we could think of (using those in  Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see? to get us started), and we compared the syllables counts of the colour words with the names. We then replaced all the names with colours of the same number of syllables, and that is the song the children have memorised.

Collaboration with ESL teachers

Last term one of my readers suggested I could set about building projects around work that my colleague teachers might already have underway in the classroom, as a way of encouraging further follow-through and reinforcement of some of the music-literacy tasks I have been developing.

It came as a timely reminder. I feel this is an approach I have tried before, and found frustrating in the lack of time there was available to properly plan with teachers, or communicate effectively about current work and goals for the class. We try, and have tried, but despite loads of good will and efforts, a true collaboration often proved elusive.

This term at the Language School I cannot teach up until the end of term (because I am going overseas – yee ha!). This means I won’t be around to lead the end-of-term performances that are such a significant and much-loved part of the term’s work.

Therefore, the teachers and I have concocted a plan – I will set about creating performance projects with the students that the teachers can continue when I am gone, that they will take through to the end of term. I need to plan composition tasks that take the teachers’ current skills into consideration, build in some in-class opportunities for teachers to lead and develop their musical skills, and work with material that is suitable for visiting in class by the teachers, during the week.

I have asked each teacher to select a book for their class to focus on for their music composition work – a book that was interesting enough to be read over and over again, and that contained useful literacy goals and vocabulary for the students. In the first week of term the books were chosen, and yesterday I started working with text from the books.

Music projects from texts

Yesterday I was at the Language School, and got the three classes I am working with this term (Lower, Middle and Upper Primaries) going on their new project for this term – building compositions from books. I suggested to each teacher that they choose a book that has a lot of staying power with their class, that we could use as source material for composition work. I am imagining we will try:

• Setting some of the text to music, or finding fun musical ways to ’sing’ the book;
• Building chants and rap from words or phrases from the text (not necessarily in order, or in context)
• Creating music that responds in some way to the images in the books.

Many of the students who have had little prior schooling (due to growing up in war-torn countries or refugee camps) may struggle to remember the alphabet, but can remember whole songs word-perfectly (in English). I want to see if approaching a text through music, using different tactics including mnemonics, assists them in their reading and word recognition. The three teachers have been wonderfully responsive to this idea and by the end of yesterday we had a book for each class. Each one offers some kind of vocabulary and emotional content that is appropriate for that age group.

Books chosen: The Very Hungry Caterpillar (with its wonderful vocab of days of the week, numbers and food); Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See? which lists different colours and animals and has a gentle rhythmic repetition to it; and Whoever you are, by Mem Fox, which has a strong affirmative message of diversity and common humanity, as well as some phrases that are crying out to be sung!