Part 2: Fostering Creativity and Improvisation

The Who

These activities were completed with a mixed group of 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade students of varying cultural and linguistic backgrounds, though the specific activities might be adjusted and simplified for a younger audience.

The Need

The purpose of this group is to provide a space for recently immigrated students and emergent multilingual students to engage with other students through musical play and community building opportunities.

The What

The secondary phase of this project continues to foster and build upon student relationships within the group, but shifts towards a focus on individual musicailty and musical expression. Especially with students of varying ages, development levels, and musical abilities, it will be important to differentiate the instruction regarding exploration and early creative improvisation. The primary goal is still to have students leaving the group feeling confident and excited about the Drum it Up opportunity.

The Music

Music is the driving feature of the Drum it Up idea, with instrument performance on percussion instruments the method to achieve our goals of building self-awareness and community amongst the participants.

The Materials

Floor drums (such as djembes, tubanos), unpitched percussion instruments (ideally, ones capable of producing high and low tones, such as two-tone blocks, agogo bells, bongos, temple blocks, etc.). You may even use D.I.Y. “drums” (plastic buckets, boxes, tubs, etc.) and two-tone instruments (pots, pans, PVC pipes, cardboard tubes, etc.)

The UDL

Drum it Up provides the opportunity for musical experiences to happen even without formal language usage. Through the use of pantomime, gesture, echoing, demonstrating, and nonverbal communication, participants of all language abilities are able to be equally engaged in the activities.

The SEL

Relationship skills is the central focus of Drum it Up – with individual participation vital for the group’s success. Where one student might disengage or lose interest, the game or jam session might weaken!

The How

Turning the activities and learning experiences into games is the best way to get participants comfortable with musical concepts. Below are some ideas for games and activities done in the second stage of our groups' meetings.

Timbre Exploration

1) With student input, explore the various tones, timbres, and techniques you can make on your instrument. Use this opportunity to demonstrate some "traditional" techniques, but also explore nontraditional techniques (scratching, knocking, scraping, tapping the instrument on the side, etc).

(Furthermore, if you have a mixture of various types of instruments, challenge yourself and your students to see if they can find a method to play that covers all of the types of instruments in the group!)

2) Create 4-beat patterns utilizing different tones and timbres. Invite other participants to create patterns for the group to echo as well!

Drum Talk

1) Begin by demonstrating echo patterns with the students. If you are presenting this activity without utilizing verbal instruction, try demonstrating this pattern of sameness with hand signs, classroom manipulatives, geometric shapes, colors, or another way to reinforce this concept.

2) Demonstrate the “poison pattern”. In the original game taught by John Scalici, he utilized double-handed high tones on an eighth note pair and quarter note, or "1-and 2" if you are counting this pattern.

3) Next, students are challenged to perform a different pattern in response to the leader! Just like a drum conversation, we usually don't copy someone else when we are talking to them. The challenge is to continue the drum conversation! Demonstrate this with different hand signs, varying shapes, different colors.

4) If the instructor or ANY participant performs this poison pattern, then no matter whose turn it is, EVERYBODY echoes it back together! Otherwise, the drum conversation goes around the circle, bouncing from leader to participant, back to the leader, and then to a different participants, leader, different participant, and so on.

Big Beat

1) Begin by playing a “ta-di” or “1-&” rhythm on the drum. This Is the “big beat”. After each big beat are three beats of rest.

2) Practice playing just the big beats and keeping hands off the drum (maybe even adding three “sh”s after to further reinforce the silent beats).

3) Continue the other drummers to keep the pattern, even doing it independently as you step away. Keeping the tempo steady is important to continue without you.

4) Once the performers are comfortable with that, add extra rhythmic improvisation while the students are resting for three beats. Encourage students to join you in this improvisation, accenting and highlighting the big beats each time.

5) Feel free to break the whole circle into different groups, different timbres/sizes of drums, partner A and B, and create opportunities for smaller groups to improvise between the big beats.

Page updated

Report abuse