Elementary Music/Music Technology Blog

Today, my 3rd graders were composing an 8-measure song using Finale Notepad ‘08 as a part of their 50 States unit. In their social studies unit, each student is assigned a state that they research and present facts about during the April “50 States Fair”. In music class, they use Finale Notepad ‘08, the notes that they study and perform on the recorder (BAG, whole notes, half notes, and quarter notes), compose an 8-measure melody, and then create an accompaniment to their melodies using Apple’s Garageband. They finish the song by writing lyrics to their state song melodies using the facts that they learned and researched about their states. This lesson is done in five groups of 4-5 students. Therefore, they work together to compose the melody and the accompaniment. When I print out their melodies, each student will individually write in their own lyrics. You can see some of the students works from last year by clicking here.

Today, I decided to give one of the larger groups a Korg Nano Keyboard to use to play the notes into the score instead of clicking and dragging the notes. The larger group tends to take a longer time, so I was hoping that by playing the keyboard, they would save some time and keep up with the rest of the class. This worked very well and the students loved playing the notes on the Korg Nano Keyboard.

A few items that I noticed that benefitted the students greatly:

1. When they played a G on the keyboard, they stopped to look at the note on screen to see if it matched what they just played. This was a great way for them to assess themselves.
2. Some of my 3rd graders have issues with their fine coordination skills. The keyboard’s keys are nice and large so all of my students achieve success when playing on them.
3. Easy to set up: Just plug it into the USB drive and the computer recognizes it immediately. In Finale Notepad ‘08, just go to the MIDI setup and click on nano keyboard. It immediately works.
4. Inexpensive: Priced at $49.99, it easily fits into an elementary general music budget.

Korg also makes a USB drum pad and a USB controller. If you would like to learn more about these products, please check out SoundTree’s website.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 at 5:56 pm and is filed under Lesson Plans, Reflections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.