Flexible Musician

Flexible Musician through Pre-Recorded Choral Lessons

This lesson was made for a fifth grade class of students to engage with during hybrid learning. In order to incorporate learning chorus music into the hybrid setting, where my sponsor teacher and I were in school and teaching students both at home and in person, we needed to pre-record videos of ourselves safely playing musical instruments and singing. I chose this piece of music to sing with our students, titled "May There Be Goodwill", because I felt the message of the song, being coming together and supporting each other, is appropriate and relatable for our students during this scary time in our world. I put the video together in iMovie, where I added the lyrics on the screen to allow students in school and at home to follow along with ease.

Competencies in Introducing Chorus Students to the International Phonetic Alphabet

One of the most beneficial things I learned about at the Crane School of Music is the International Phonetic Alphabet. The International Phonetic Alphabet, or "IPA", is taught to undergraduate vocalists to help aid pronunciation of lyrics in foreign languages. During my time at Crane, I sang songs in English, German, Latin, Italian, French, Russian, and Yiddish. In order to move from one language to another, IPA is used as a tool to remember proper pronunciation for words through symbols derived from Greek and Latin alphabets. Because it is not safe to sing with students in school right now, I designed this lesson for our eighth grade chorus classes to learn about a unique tool used by vocalists globally to accurately perform music in foreign languages.