Week 6 Music 2

Music 2: Performing – Singing and Moving

The music tutorial this week focused more on performing and sound-organising. One activity called ‘Beachcombing’ caught my full attention and made everyone in the class engaged. After listening and singing the song, students chose one instrument each and created own verses about the beach environment. Then students explored musical concepts of tone colour, duration and dynamics to creative their own sound story. The activity was design based on the Creative Arts K-6 Syllabus that:

MUS1.2: Explores, creates, selects and organises sound in simple structure.

I would like to use this actvity in my future teaching since the song “Beachcombing” built a positive and engaging learning environment for all the students to imagine and create. In Gulbenkian Report (1982) identified one contribution that music brought to education was

“Developing capacity for creative thought and action. Music stimulates creativity because making music involves experimenting with sounds and rhythm. Used creatively, music develops ‘elaborative, original, fluent, and flexible thinking’ (Cornett, 1999, p.322)” (Gibson, R. & Ewing, R., 2011).

Students used one instrument each group and made a statement to sing and perform. While students were creating song and lyrics, they had to use their prior knowledge of the particular environment and higher order thinking to establish connection between the song and their instruments. During performance, students understood and developed their knowledge about the instruments, singing and performing skills as well as the joy of playing music.

References:

Gibson, R. & Ewing, R. (2011). Transforming the curriculum through the Arts. Palgrave Macmillan: Melbourne.

NSW Board of Studies. (2006). Creative Arts K-6 Syllabus. Sydney: BOS.