How do You Start Teaching Melody to Young Students?
Listen on
Season 1 | Episode 51
Show Notes
Can you start at the beginning? How do you go about teaching melody to grade 1?
There’s no single “how to.” Other pedagogues have other ways, other pedagogues would have things they tweak about this process.
This is basically the same way we teach melodic concepts to other grades as well! Here’s the process. We’ll spread these experiences out over several weeks.
Two avenues of curiosity for me: Active assessment and crafting a space for students to make creative decisions in pedagogy. Both of these deserve their own devoted time.
Active Experience
Sing and play games
This is the core body of work in the classroom
Establish a musical context: Students are gathering musical resources (tonal patterns, weighted beats in a meter, rhythmic durations, etc.) that they’ll use later
The teacher is the informer
Imitation (Orff hat) Prepare (Kodaly hat)
Assessment questions:
Do we hear students singing the song? (we’ll need to stop singing to listen)
Do we hear students matching pitch? Do we sing the target element in this ensemble context?
Apple Tree | Pala Palita
Sing and play the game
Share background information
Notice & Explore
Move to the melodic contour
Exploratory-Curricular Creativity:
Get curious: I have a curious question..... / What would happen if...
We mixed up the form, if we changed the words, etc.
Can you move to the melodic contour? Can you show the melody in your spot? While moving in open space? Can you show it with a partner?
What’s the highest / lowest word? What is it higher / lower than, compared to other pitches we know?
How many steady beats do you hear in this phrase? How many pitches do you hear in this phrase?
Which picture on the board matches the song? Why? How could we write it down in a way that makes sense?
Could we find the relationship on barred instruments?
Teacher as the guide
Exploration (Orff hat) Prepare (Kodaly hat)
Assessment questions:
To what extent do we use the element in multiple contexts?
Do we accurately describe the melody? Do we have explanations for how we might show it visually?
Apple Tree | Pala Palita
Apple Tree:
Pick apples (by yourself, then with a friend) to show the melodic contour of the first four beats
How many steady beats do you hear in this part of the song? (four) How many pitches do you hear in those first four beats? (two) Is there a pattern in our song with the words and the pitches? (yes - “apple” is a high pitch. “tree” is a low pitch)
Which picture of apples on the board matches the song?
Pala Palita:
Can you use your stick to paint the melodic contour?
Echo melodic patterns with different articulations. The teacher sings, students echo with a different articulation
Can you arrange the coins to show the first four beats? Could you mix up the order to show a new combination?
Establish Communication
“Real musicians call it so many things! Sometimes they don’t call it anything at all. In this class, we’ll call the high pitch sol and the low pitch mi”
Sing target phrase on solfege with hand signs (body solfege or Curwen hand signs)
“Real musicians write this so many different ways! Sometimes they don’t write it down at all. In this class, sol and mi are always a skip apart. If sol is on a line, mi is on the line below, a skip down. If sol is on a space, mi is always on the space below, a skip down.”
Sing target phrase and point to the staff
Teacher as the informer
Label (Orff hat) Present (Kodaly hat)
Explore Consciously
Use the element consciously to aurally identify, read, write, improvise, arrange, compose, and expand partwork skills
Explore with increased levels of independence and interdependence
Curricular creativity: Use the information consciously to create (arrange, improvise, compose)
Teacher as the guide
Create (Orff hat) Practice (Kodaly hat)
Assessment questions:
To what extent do we use the element consciously with increased levels of musical ownership?
Concepts vs Activities
It can be easy to look at teaching with the “how to” parts of the job: “how to teach this song” and “how to write this pitch” and “how to play this fingering on recorder”
This is a “how to” question about the structural concept of melodic learning. We’ll spiral this same process across the other grade levels, with other concepts, all using the process of experiencing through play, noticing with curiosity, and creating in community
