Linda Insook Díaz
Musical Painting: An Interactive Approach to Music Composition for Children
For my Young Artist Project, In an effort to empower young students toward creating and performing music of their own creation, I have prepared a two-week course that utilizes familiarity with movement and visual media to introduce concepts of composition including: sound/timbre, expression (dynamics, texture, articulation), pitch (tonality, melody, harmony, range), time (form, rhythm, meter, tempo), notation, and collaboration. Each lesson is structured for a 30-minute time block with the goal of easily being fit into a weekly classroom schedule and of satisfying a number of LAUSD arts standards (last updated 2019).
With guidance and support from Susan Helfter and Megan Adcock from the Thornton Community Engagement Program (TCEP), I was able to gain a better understanding of where students in 1st and 2nd grade are developmentally, existing approaches to music education for young children, and the opportunity to pilot my two-week curriculum with a 1st grade class at St. Vincent Elementary School.
Even with a pre-established curriculum, I have learned with past TCEP experiences that every class responds a little differently to each activity and adapting quickly to keep the students engaged is a must. Thus, unsurprisingly, after my first class with the students, I found I had to make many adjustments to my original planned curriculum to better suit their learning process. In this folder is the original Lesson1 visual presentation and the updated Lesson2 presentation for your perusal! Ultimately, the detailed two-week curriculum (updated after the pilot) will also stay on file with TCEP to be available for future programming!
Name Compositions
After drawing connections between the size, color, and physical placement of the phrase “My name is ____” to how they might “perform” it with different dynamics, body percussion, and direction/inflections, I gave each of the students the opportunity to write their own “Name Composition.” Many of the students opted to mirror a lot of the elements of my example to their own (such as the squiggle and orientation of the words/letters), but many also expanded upon the ideas and introduced a greater variety of colors and shapes!
Interestingly, many students also showed an impulse to begin the activity by writing their name in the upper left corner and ultimately kept the entirety of their composition to that space. Given that the students had very good discipline to follow rules, I got the sense that they were often told to write their name in this way.
Landscape Compositions
In the final activity of the lesson, we composed and performed a “landscape composition” as a class. This took the form of playground setting (quick tapping of the feet to represent the mulch) with a variety of playground equipment corresponding to different body percussion movements. Even though we didn’t have time to draw out the notation individually, some students followed along on their own!
Story Compositions
To introduce the next “Story Composition,” I reviewed “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider” song with the class and highlighted aspects of character and change over a beginning-middle-end story form. As a class, we also added movements to each part of the story in the song. In preparing to write our own “Story Compositions,” we went through all the different sounds/movements different animals make and made outlines on our paper for each part of the story.
As a class, we then chose which character (cat), setting (city), and obstacle (lightning storm) we would use to build our story composition, and how the obstacle would be overcome (running away until it is safe). With limited time, I directed the class to follow along as I drew out the story on the board and to give ideas for sound and movement to bring the story to life! We then performed as a class our complete “Story Composition!”