Teaching Ideas

Using the EduCreations App on our iPads, students began composing with musical Dice. This past week, several grades tried their hand at composing music on the iPad with a musical staff die. We talked about how Mozart did something similar in his day. We’ve been learning about the staff, and I thought it would be a fun adventure to jump right in and get the boys and girls writing down music. We can drill the names of line and space notes later… I wanted to make it real… instantly! A Melody must have these two ingredients  rhythm and pitch. I had them think of their favorite song and be prepared to sing it. Then I tossed the ball to them, and they had to quickly sing one phrase.  We decided that  in order to have a memorable melody, we must have pitch and rhythm. This is our first try… I’ll get to the question and answer phrases and all the other blah, blah, blah soon enough. We used the EduCreations iPad App. At first, I had the children draw the staff… but after two classes of that time-consuming idea, I had the rest scan a QR code to download a staff image. The children duplicated the image and then took a picture of the two staves to keep in their photo roll.