Today we’re talking about how to take one song, rhyme, or activity and extend it across multiple lessons in lower elementary music. My name is Victoria Boler and this is episode 62 of Elemental Conversations.
This is a conversation from a colleague on Instagram and they asked to talk about
”How to add variety and length when extending a song across multiple lessons for younger elementary”
This is a very fun topic for me, because the possibilities are wide open in terms of how we might iterate and reiterate experiences around a song. So let’s talk about some core questions that can frame some of these decisions, because the beauty of this topic is that we can all arrive at different correct answers, depending on how we answer these questions. We’ll look at some strategies for extending a song once we’ve answered our core questions, and then we’ll explore an example or two.
Core Questions when Extending a Song
I mentioned that this topic is fun because it’s so open-ended. There are many many ways we might choose to extend a song! And we can all come up with different pathways, because we can answer these core questions differently.
What am I using the song to teach? Why did I choose it in the first place?
How can students express the musical concept?
What Am I Using the Song to Teach?
What’s the pedagogical focus? Why did we choose it in the first place?
Musical Concepts:
This is a question about a musical concept.
I’m using “concept” to mean a component, or building block of music. We can have the conversation as to whether or not that’s the best term for what we’re describing.
With younger elementary musical concepts might be things like fast and slow, loud and quiet, steady beat, singing voice, long and short, rhythm vs beat, or ta and ta-di.
The concepts we focus on will be dependent on the sequence we’re using. There are lots of sequences out there, and I’m not of the opinion that there is one set specific sequence for everyone, but in many viewpoints on music education, these early concepts of things like singing voice and beat awareness are pretty widely-accepted.
The question here is what musical understanding does this song point to? What musical element or core building block are we asking students to explore? This question gives us a topic to center the activities around.
How Might Students Express this Musical Concept?
Now we have a main topic to focus the learning experiences. So what might those experiences look like? This is a question about musical skills.
Musical Skills:
Musical skills are the doings of music. These are the musical actions we take to express an understanding.
In elementary general music, those doings look like singing, playing, speaking, moving, reading, writing, improvising, arranging, composing, listening, and aurally identifying.
Dispositions:
As we execute musical skills, we also interact with ourselves and other musicians. So part of the experience piece is also developing dispositions.
The national standards list:
Collaboration
Flexibility
Goal Setting
Inquisitiveness
Openness and respect for the ideas and work of others
Responsible Risk Taking
Self-Reflection
Self-discipline and Perseverance
Depending on your situation you might be using the CASEL SEL framework, or a state or district set of social and emotional understandings.
Lesson Planning Tools
When we have the answers to these core questions down, the lesson extensions kind of write themselves. All we need to do is put students in a setting where they can explore many different skills that point back to the pedagogical purpose.
To do that, we’ll add a few tools to our toolkit to streamline this process even more.
Long-Range Planning and Song Lists
Episode 23: Long-range Planning for Elementary General Music
When we have a clear idea of where we’re going with this curriculum, all the other decisions in the classroom become easier.
We can use long-range planning to get an overview of how we might spend our time in lessons. And when we have a broad view of how we might spend our time, we see how each little activity is linked to the next activity. And the activity after that and the activity after that.
So when we sing a song and play a game, that musical experience isn’t isolated. We’re doing it for a specific reason. The song and the game lead to the next activity. And that activity leads to the next activity. The whole process snowballs. And the great thing about that is when the lesson is over, we’ve basically already written the next lesson for next week! We don’t need to reinvent the wheel and come up with a brand new song or game or activity to teach. We don’t need to start from scratch. We just do the next artistic step with that same song. We build on the experience.
One specific document that can be helpful with this is a concepts and songs list. This is where we’ll take a list of concepts we’re going to teach - steady beat, high and low, long and short, etc. - and we list out the songs we’re going to use to teach that concept. This is important because the repertoire we choose sets the context for all the other learning experiences that come later. Having a collection of fun and musically satisfying materials is like having a full pantry of ingredients so we always have what we need.
Building an Activity Map
So now we have our repertoire. We have our concept we’re going to teach. We have a list of skills and dispositions.
How do these all come together in an actual lesson segment?
One of the tools I love to use when I feel stuck is an activity map.
I’ll take the concept and put it at the top of the page. Then I’ll take the song and put it in a circle in the middle of the page. Then I’ll off-shoot some thought bubbles from that middle song bubble with the labels, sing, play, move, read, write, improvise, arrange / compose, listen, and aurally identify.
If I were to do that with the song Bell Horses for sol and mi, I’d put sol and mi across the top of the page. In the center bubble I’ll put Bell Horses. And then I’ll have bubbles coming out of the song title with my musical skills.
So maybe we’ll sing the song and play the game, and I’ll put that under sing. And I could stop there. But if I’m trying to come up with many different ideas then I might want to hang out there for a bit. So I might say we’ll sing the first four beats on a neutral syllable. We could also sing it on “high” and “low” or on “sol” and “mi,” depending on where we are in the learning progression. As a B section I could sing a sol and mi melody and students could echo. Someone could sing the first four beats as a solo.
There are lots of possibilities! Again, that’s just under one bubble. I can do the same thing for multiple skill bubbles as well.
We can pretend to be horses and show the high and low sounds of the first four beats. I’ll put that under move.
We can play the first four beats on barred instruments.
We can improvise conversations about where we’re going on our horses.
This activity map will be tied back to our long-range plans, again, 23 has more information. Because if our end assessment for a unit involves students composing or improvising or arranging, we’re going to want to make sure our activities are leading to that final creative invitation. This activity map is a useful tool for brainstorming, but we’re going to want to make sure we’ve thought through the sequencing of what activities will come first and which ones will come later, that way we’re giving students an appropriate musical invitation in an appropriate order. Because there’s also a consideration here for whatever learning sequence we’re using to teach this concept. In my case I use prepare, present, practice, so that framework is going to guide the decisions I make about what activities to introduce and when.
So I don’t view this mind map as a replacement for unit planning, but I do use it as a helpful tool for unit planning because it can really get me out of a rut when all I can think to do is sing the song and play the game.
You see how when we look at all the musical media and skills we have access to in general music, one small song can easily take up several lessons!
Length of the lesson
That brings me to an important point that might go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway. When I refer to a lesson segment, I mean a short portion of the full lesson, about 2 to 7ish minutes total.
This is because we’re working with young students in lower elementary. So our lessons will be crammed with many different activities - maybe 10 songs or so - but each musical interaction will be pretty short.
We touched on this in the last episode (Episode 61 - My Students Won’t Stop Talking), but a reasonable length of time for me to stay focused is much much much longer than I can expect from a 6-year-old. So I have to remember to keep these musical interactions brief and go with students’ pacing.
The nice thing is, because the length of these lesson segments is so short, that makes it easy to extend a song over several different lessons!
Song Extension Example
Let’s look at a more detailed example of how one song can live for multiple weeks. In this case its a rhyme.
Pito Pito Colorito - Ta & Ta-di
This is from the 1st grade ta and ta-di concept plan inside The Planning Binder.
Introduce
Before we even get to the musical skills, we’re going to want to introduce this rhyme! Introducing a song or a rhyme or a game could be its own conversation, but something to think about is that there are so many beautiful and artistic ways to introduce a song. When in doubt, teaching each phrase by rote is a great method. But we can also think about infusing the context of the song into the introduction itself. In this case, the rhyme is about a bird who is going somewhere. So here we go.
T speaks, ss pat steady beat. This rhyme is about a bird. The rhyme asks, “donde vas tan tempranito” - where are you going so early? Where do you think the bird was going? .... Maybe the bird is driving to the beach!
Speak again, ss act out a bird driving to the beach
“Donde vas tan tempranito?” - Where do you think the bird was going? Ss give an answer (riding a bicycle to the store, taking a jet ski to get a sandwich, etc.) You’re CORRECT!
Repeat rhyme with s ideas. Repeat the question in Spanish each round.
Ss speak the first half of the rhyme, T speaks the second
Eventually share the rhyme translation
Disposition: Flexible thinking - where was the bird going?
So that’s our rhyme introduction.
Skills
Our skills are going to be speaking, playing, improvising, reading, and arranging.
Speak - Speak the rhyme and play the game
Disposition - Collaboration. This is a passing game, and passing games take a lot of group coordination.
We could hang out here and just speak the rhyme and play the game and that could be it! That would be enough. But if we’ve answered the questions from earlier, we also have more possibilities we might explore. So let’s look at a game extension.
Play - Speak and play game.
When someone is out, they choose if they’ll play the rhythm with rhythm sticks one one side of the circle, or the steady beat with a hand drum on the other side of the circle
Disposition - Self-discipline - What will you do when you don’t get out and you don’t get a turn with an instrument? Yikes, that's really hard! This is a skill musicians have to practice, because musicians are not always chosen for every part.
Improvise -
Seated, pat a steady beat and speak rhyme. As a B section, T claps and asks: Where are you going? Ask four times. Ss speak and clap different answers each time (responses do not necessarily need to be and two sounds on a beat at first)
Examples:
I am going _____(to outer space / to a restaurant / to the store)
After a while, narrow options to answers on the board, written in text only (no notation). Speak all the answers, then repeat activity and ss choose their favorite response
Disposition - Flexibility and Responsible Risk-Taking - How many responses can you come up with, while keeping them within the meter?
Read -
Let’s jump ahead to after the presentation moment when we’re using standard Western notation for one and two sounds on a beat.
Sight read different options on the board
Where is the bird hiding? The teacher plays a pattern and ss show which one it is
Which one is your favorite pattern? Please show me on your fingers. Flap your arms like a bird when you hear it
Arrange -
Use rhythmic building blocks with places the bird could be going:
In groups of two, ss look at the board and choose a combination to clap
Practice clapping four times in a row
Disposition - Collaboration - Students are choosing this combination with a partner
So for this set of activities, after the rhyme introduction, we had speaking, playing, improvising, reading, and arranging. We used several dispositions along the way: Flexibility, self-discipline, responsible risk-taking, and collaboration. All these activities pointed back to the curricular goal, ta and ta-di.
Do you see how these activities could take up multiple weeks, but it’s not the exact same activity every time?
OK so that’s in the ta and ta-di concept plan for first grade. Just to camp out here a moment, the other songs in that same concept plan are Bounce High Bounce Low, Engine Engine Number Nine, Hey Betty Martin, Los Pollitos Dicen, Pito Pito Colorito, and Willum He Had Seven Sons. So I don’t want to make it sound like Pito Pito was the only ta and ta-di selection in there.
Pacing across lessons
When we talk about transitions, we might be talking about transitions that happen within a single lesson, like moving from a singing game to instruments. But we might also be referring to transitions between actual lessons themselves, from week to week.
When we ask students to hang onto information across several lessons, we’re going to need to do some sort of review before we jump into an extension. We need to set the context first. I envision this as looping circle line that circles back and then circles forward. In general, it’s a good idea to refresh everyone’s memory of the rhyme or song by playing the game
Many of these games, even though they’re simple, they’re going to take a while for students to get the hang of. Especially if we want students to be able to sing the song and play the game without our help, it’s going to take a few iterations of exposure.
Review the last class. Take in that data to see if the new extension we had planned is going to work out, or if we need to spend another class singing and playing the game - all good either way - we just need to know where we are.
Will Students Get Bored with the Song?
One last thing to touch on - when we talk about extending a song over several lessons, I know there’s a danger of students getting bored with the song, so I want to address that before we head out.
Because sometimes students are bored with the song. But sometimes we’re projecting because we ourselves are so tired of the song!
What can we do about song burnout?
Choose songs you love.
If a song strikes you as cheesy or contrived, there’s probably a good reason! If we have Kindergarten every day of the week, we’re going to end up singing these songs over and over and over and over! So we need to choose songs we’re happy to spend a good amount of time with. There are so many beautiful repertoire selections to choose from. If you don’t care for a particular song, move on. Find a different one.
Keep the musical interactions brief
We’ve already talked about this, so we won’t camp out here. Early childhood activities are short. That’s a good thing for us.
Spending four minutes a day with a song is much more enjoyable than spending forty minutes a day with a song.
Change up the activities
That’s what we’re talking about here. Circle back and review, then change up the activity so its fresh for students and fresh for us.
So today we’ve talked about a lot of things! We’ve looked at some core questions to ask when we’re extending a song across multiple lessons - Why did we choose the song in the first place and how do we want students to express their musical understanding?
We looked at a few tools to use for setting up activities, like leaning into long-range planning and creating an activity map. We looked at a few examples of a single song reiterated over several weeks, and we talked about transitioning between lessons by reviewing before extending.