Project 1

The Lesson Plan

Backward Design Lesson Plan

This lesson is designed for second grade general music students to explore the diatonic major scale. Typically, the lesson involves learning a song, singing the song with Curwen hand signs, and adding instruments to the song, but two tech tools from the Creatability Collection of Google experiments give this lesson a major enhancement that allows students to explore the content independently and to compose their very own pieces of music using their new skillset.

Learning the Scale

At the onset of the lesson, the major scale and solfege syllables are introduced using the song "Do-Re-Mi" from The Sound of Music, a song that a handful of students tend to be somewhat familiar with. Students keep a steady beat while they listen to the song and then learn song and the hand signs.

After students are proficient at singing the song with the hand signs, they sing and play along with Boomwhackers, which are colored tubes in graduated sizes that are pitched to correspond with solfege syllables in the scale.

Tech enhancement #1: Keyboard

The Creatability Keyboard tool allows students to perform a major scale using a colorful keyboard that matches the colors of the Boomwhackers used earlier in the lesson.

Another feature of the Keyboard tool is that students don't necessarily have to use their hands to move the cursor to each note; rather, the body tracking settings can be adjusted to follow the student's nose (pictured), wrist, elbow, or various other body parts.

Tech enhancement #2: Word Synth

The Creatability Word Synth tool gives students an opportunity to compose a song using whatever words they want to add. Again, the colors match the Boomwhackers as well as the notes used in the Keyboard tool. The example above shows the solfege syllables represented via Word Synth.

Students can be creative and have fun as they compose their own songs including each of the pitches in the diatonic major scale and add their own lyrics while following some simple composition rules, such as starting and ending with "do" (the tonic, or "home tone").

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