Putting the A in STEAM through Composition

This past week I had the privilege of attending our school's STEM night for the first time. This is an annual event for our students and families. Classroom teachers present information to parents about math strategies and websites they can use at home. Our STEM teachers present about technology and creative problem-solving skills that they use in their classroom.

Arts and music teachers rarely ever attend this particular event, so I'm proud that the STEM teachers asked me if they could include the fun new game Compose Yourself that I've been using with my classes. I gladly volunteered to attend and man the station!

I first learned about this game when someone posted about it in the Music Teachers facebook group. I've been using it in different ways with different students. For younger kids, I've been using it as a whole group activity on the SmartBoard. With my older kids, I have them figure out how to play the patterns on xylophones and/or take them to the computer lab to create their compositions online. 

In order to play this online composition game, you need to purchase the cards ahead of time. I purchased mine from Amazon and have included a link if you would like to get it for yourself! (Note: this is an Amazon affiliate link and I receive a commission from purchases made through this link.)

 It comes with a deck of 60 cards, each with one measure of melody, that can be flipped upside down or turned over to create endless melodic combinations. Once you pick your cards, you can input them into the Compose Yourself website and hear your melody played back (with optional harmonization by a full orchestra) and then you can further edit it until it sounds the way you want it to.

At STEM night, I set up a table with some chromebooks and had my copy of the game cards ready to go. It was so great to see the kids' faces light up as they heard what their composition sounded like after it was played back. And it was also great for their parents and teachers to see how we integrate technology into music class!

Trash to Treble Treasure

Happy Friday, everyone! Six weeks of school are officially on the books for us in Maryland. Now that the High Holidays are over, we finally had a full week of school with no interruptions. To break up my week a little bit, I did some fun music games and review centers this week. Here's a great one that I added to my roster of center activities this year.... And it didn't cost me anything!

Review treble clef notes while reinforcing tier 1 vocabulary!

The teacher's lounge at one of my schools has this magical table... it's a kind of parking lot for unwanted teaching supplies. Teachers drop things off when they are no longer useful and the rest of us swoop in and find ways to repurpose them for our classrooms. Two years ago I scored a free set of cuisenaire rods that I repurposed into a really fun rhythm game.

This time, someone was discarding a huge set of sight words flashcards. 

(Out of curiosity, I tried to find their author/source... The cards say Bea's Hive on them but a google search didn't return any results for me. If you know who makes these cards or more about them, I'd be interested to learn more!)

So I printed out some free staff paper and came up with a brand new treble clef review activity:

Students draw a card and must write a complete sentence using the word. Then they look through the sentence and find all the letters in the musical alphabet. Finally, they notate those letters on the staff. 

This is a great cross-curricular activity to reinforce vocabulary and sentence building while also reviewing treble clef notes.

Full STEAM Ahead!

Raise your hand if you love Arts Integration!

Raise your hand if the concept of Arts Integration completely stresses you out!

I have definitely been on both sides of this coin. So far, out of the four schools in which I've taught, two have been STEAM schools where arts integration is expected out of the classroom teachers and cultural arts teachers. (STEAM = Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Math) I've been fortunate enough to attend several local workshops on arts integration, the most interesting of which would definitely have to be The Arts Integration Conference at UMBC. 

I am by no means an expert on the subject, but I would like to share one important principle of arts integration:

An arts integrated lesson should have TWO objectives: one for the arts component of the lesson, and one for the general ed component. For example: While it's certainly wonderful to use a catchy song to teach multiplication tables, this would NOT be an AI lesson, because the music is merely there as a tool to enhance the math lesson. 

The reason I bring this up in a post today is because I wanted to share my most recent product, Musical Math! 

A brief backstory: Last year, the entire faculty at one of my schools attended a PD session with Greg Tang. It's not very often that I am asked to attend a session on teaching math, and this session showed me many teaching models that I had never heard of. When he discussed the part-whole relationship model, I immediately saw how it could be applied to music. Now that I am building up my TpT store, I finally got around to developing this product!

The product includes 30 different examples. If you have an electronic white board, you can draw the missing notes directly onto the slides. Or, you could print these slides for students to complete individually. (If there is interest I might spend the extra time to make a student follow-along packet. Let me know in the comments if this is something you might be interested in.)

I can't wait to use this with my fourth graders tomorrow. Be on the lookout for more STEAM related blog posts in the future.