Lesson # 1/3

2 December 2015

Objectives
Students will demonstrate their ability to:

collaborate with other students

create their own music with guidelines

Activities/Strategies
Discuss briefly the plan for the project for anyone who is still unclear.
Go over pentatonic scale meaning, what notes we will be using (because of transposing
instruments), etc
Have students experiment with different pentatonic melodic ideas on their instruments/the piano
Discuss the ideas the students came up with
Decide where to go next with the song
Assist with the understanding of the students' melodic ideas by playing the piano when asked

Students are creating by coming up with their own melodic ideas, but they are also performing
said ideas for one another. They are also assessing those ideas as a group and collectively
deciding which ideas should be part of the whole.

Assessments
Constant informal feedback during the session what's working, what's not, what's confusing,
etc.

Materials
Student's instruments, piano, staff paper, white board w/markers

Class Groupings
Small Group

Lesson 1 Commentary/Analysis

This lesson went fairly well. My intention was to gauge the students' interest in the project and provide
them with enough time to experiment and come up with ideas. I wanted them to listen to each other's
ideas seriously and they did so. The three students involved in the project have great attitudes about
doing this project, and they have all been in band since 5 th grade. Throughout the lesson they were
asking questions I hadn't even thought to answer, which was my own lack of preparation. Examples of
their questions are, What's the range we're allowed to use? How many measures does it have to be?
Can we have a pickup note? What about articulations, like slurs and stuff? Some of the answers to
these questions were things I had thought about and simply hadn't passed along that information (I
forgot to print the ranges for them to use, as well as give them a limit on measures) but the articulation
question really threw me. How cool that these seventh graders were already thinking that far ahead!

Lesson #2/3

3 December 2015

Objectives
Students will demonstrate their ability to:
Further their original ideas as group
Continue to develop ideas together and separately

Activities/Strategies
Playing the individual notes will not be an issue because the melody will be simple and playable
Focus will be on the process of creating the melody experimenting on instrument, sharing that
with the group, having a discussion about it
Give the students time to do the above process on their own, with as little interjection as
possible
Assist with the writing of the compiled melodic ideas that will become the final song
*This is necessary because of the transposing of instruments; final song will be in
concert pitch
Assist with the understanding of the students' melodic ideas by playing the piano when asked

Students are creating by coming up with their own melodic ideas, but they are also performing
said ideas for one another. They are also assessing those ideas as a group and collectively
deciding which ideas should be part of the whole.

Assessments
Constant informal feedback during session

Materials
Student's instruments, piano, staff paper, white board w/markers

Class Groupings
Small Group

Lesson 2 Commentary/Analysis

This time around, the trio needed much less guidance than the first time. One of the students
had actually gone home and written out a few melodic ideas that the other two students approved of
(and actually really liked!), so they picked out which measures they were going to use in the final song
and in which order they would appear. The second lesson to so little time because they pretty much
finished it up using the outside work the student brought in. I really didn't do much in this lesson except
play the measures on the piano in the order they wanted so that they could hear all the different ways
they could be put together and make a decision.

Lesson #3/3

4 December 2015

Objectives
Students will demonstrate their ability to:
Continue to work together towards a common goal
Perform the completed work for their peers

Activities/Strategies
Ask that the students put their finishing touches on the composition
Perform the finished song for the class
Reconvene with the three students for a written reflection/assessment of the project

Assessments
Constant informal feedback during composition session
Written assessment post-performance

Materials
Student's instruments, staff paper, white board w/markers

Class Groupings
Small Group

Lesson 3 Commentary/Analysis

This lesson did not go the way I wanted it to!! When we went in the choir room to work on it,
the kids came in with a lot of ideas that we just didn't have time to add. I felt really bad about it,

because they came in with so many good ideas, but we only had time to polish what we had and pick a
title (picking a title took more time than it should have). I began to get stressed out toward the end of
the first part of the lesson the part where we tweaked the composition because they were wanting to
add so much and the way we had set up the class didn't allow for that kind of time. If this were a longer
project, that took place over a longer period of time, it would have been a different story. In an ideal
world, I would like to give them as much time as they wanted. However, that's just not how this project
worked. That it part of the challenge of this project, though time management! It's hard! Who'd have
thought.