Elementary Music/Music Technology Blog

Continuing with my posts on how the nine national standards from The National Association for Music Education (MENC) can be enhanced by technology in the elementary general music classroom, today I approach standard #8. FYI: This is out of order because I have blogged about Standards 1-4.

Content Standard #8: Understanding relationships between music, the other arts, and disciplines outside the arts.

This lesson came to me yesterday as I was thinking about integration. For the next two days, I am at the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) in San Antonio, Texas. I am presenting at the Avid Education Booth (includes Avid, Sibelius, M-Audio, Pinnacle, and Digidesign) on Sibelius’s Groovy Music Series of Groovy Shapes (ages 5-7), Groovy Jungle (ages 7-9), and Groovy City (ages 9-11). These programs teach music theory and composition skills using animations and pictures. They are wonderfully geared for elementary grades (PreK-Grade 6). As I present, I continuously show my students’ works created in Groovy Shapes, Jungle, and City.

Standard #8 came to me as I was presenting Groovy Jungle because this program is set in the rainforest. My 3rd graders study the rainforest in science and they are continuously writing about the facts of the rainforest. In Groovy Jungle Create Mode, there is a typing tool. The 3rd graders will type in facts about the rainforest. Then, they will use the rhythm trees, the melody butterflies, the arpeggio flies, the chord spiderwebs, the bass line bushes, and the bonus sounds that consist of a variety of animals found in the rainforests, to create a song that compliments their written facts. These completed songs can be posted on groovymusic.com where parents and students can go to view and listen to the song as it is seen and heard in the program itself.

If you have never seen the Groovy Series, I encourage you to read about it at Sibelius’s website and to check out some students’ works on Groovymusic.com.

If you are at the NECC Conference, please come to one of my sessions on Tuesday, July 1, at 11:00 am and 3:00 pm or on Wednesday, July 2, at 11:00 am and 1:30 pm, at booth 8222. Sibelius is giving out a free Groovy triple pack (Shapes, Jungle, and City) to one participant at each of the sessions.

Have you ever used and of the Groovy Music Series in your music classroom? Or, have you even enhanced a standard #8 lesson with technology?