Year 4 Materials

Materials can undergo changes that provide challenges and benefits for society and the environment

What?

We are learning:

to recognise a variety of instruments and their characteristics.
how to create and accompany music using a variety of sounds and instruments
to use the iPad App Samplebot

Why?

We want to understand:

Function - How societies choose material suitable to their needs
Perspective - Materials can be used for a variety of purposes
Responsibility - Ethics in processing materials and their by-products

How?

To achieve this, we will need to use:

Research skills:
- Record observations.
Creative Thinking:
- Apply existing knowledge to design new products
Social skills:
- Learn cooperatively in a group.
- Build consensus and negotiate effectively.

We started our Inquiry by watching this video, in which music teachers used their school building to create a musical piece using all kinds of materials:

This video of the Landfillharmonic project, in Paraguay, inspired us to see how materials can be recycled in wonderful ways and to learn how powerful music can be to change people's lives.

We used this Listening Guide for our reflections

Listening Guide. Landfillharmonic.pdf

To continue with our Inquiry about Music and Materials we looked at a lot of musical instruments and the materials they are made of. We discussed how these materials affect the way instruments work and the musical element timbre, which is the unique characteristics a sound has based on what produces it, like for example how each of our voices are unique and easy to recognise. On the following videos and playlists you can see all the instruments we explored:

Strings Instruments

Woodwind Instruments

Brass Instruments

North American Instruments

South American Instruments

Central American Instruments

African Instruments

Asian Instruments

Report abuse