Intended audience?
West Coast Alaska, Middle School
About how much class time to do this lesson?
About 2 class periods of 45 minutes, with priming, teaching stories/musical techniques
What’s the essential question? (is there one)
Still thinking….
What source material would students use (include a link or example).
Yup’k stories and storytellers (Youtube, visits from elders). Examples of what it means to create a soundscape from various films.
Some examples:
A brief explanation of “what are the kids going to do?”
Students will work cooperatively to produce a soundscape with instruments available in the classroom. The goal is to create a soundtrack a traditional Yup’ik story. Students will work in small groups each in charge of a particular of scene or part of the story. This lesson could also incorporate the skills they develop from Andrew’s lesson on recording technology to record the story with their soundscape. Storytelling, especially scary stories, is a really big part of Yup’ik culture and it is also very engaging for Middle School aged students.
Nice I dig the idea of making a sound track to a traditional story along with the cross over help with Andrew’s project.
This is great, Heidi. I imagine this would be very engaging for the kids and I would love to hear what kind of soundtrack they might produce.
I agree. These kids have access to Western movies and whatnot, so they’re familiar with the idea of “soundtracks.” I think that doing some kind of a soundtrack for a specifically Yup’ik story has the potential to be very interesting and even culturally empowering.
I wonder what forms of music they’d use? Would they be the primarily Western forms and adaptations that you see in Hollywood? Would they be more local? Would they use “scary movie” conventions like from a typical horror movie. It definitely sounds like it has promise.
When you’re thinking about content to embed in the iBook, I think maybe a number of scenes from horror movies might be relevant.
Actually I think students sometimes don’t reflect on many things around them. So I would explicitly guide them through listening to some soundtracks from different genre and let them develop a guide to understanding what soundtrack do. Then turn them lose on your project. Here’s a lesson I did a number of years ago “Selling Sleeping Pills – Common Core and Close Reading.” It offers one approach for listening to soundtracks
It was awesome to chat with you today about your lesson plan idea. I like the possibility of our plans connecting the recording/listening focused skills in some way.
I also like that you’re trying to do something listening focused, I feel as music educators we can too easily get focused on performing. Listening and thinking musically is a much more important skill!
Heidi, I really liked reading about how your lesson developed and transformed into your final product for the iBook. Your concept of a digital soundtrack to a traditional Yup’ik story is awesome. I also like that the project came to include both older students and younger students in a way that allowed for peer mentorship, cultural preservation, and ultimately spurred both groups to learn. I think it is really cool that your project and Andy’s interview project tie-in together to create a larger, unified resource for preserving oral tradition and Yup’ik culture.