Degrees of the Scale Sticky Dots!

Hi, again! I just wanted to share an idea the children and I came up with. I presented the “Degrees of the Scale” lesson from my Montessori albums, and some children wanted to follow-up by playing the piano.

The problem was, the children wanted to know where the scale degrees were located on the keyboard. So, we took some colored sticky dots and placed them on the piano above the keyboard. Like so:

In this photo, you can see the stickers placed above the Do-major (C-major) scale. We had to use pink for the mediant, instead of brown. If you’d like to know what notes correspond to what scale degrees in what scale, feel free to shoot me an email.

The next step is to develop a transposing scale strip for the piano keyboard, like the ones we use with the tone bars. I’m working on it. I’ll keep you posted on how it’s developing.

For now, more later!

Composing Your Own Score, Part 2

In a previous post, I wrote to you about how to get the children following up from a music lesson by composing their own score. Apologies if I’ve already covered this, but here, I’d like to add just a little detail.

First of all, you can find the steps to composing a score here.

Now, when the children compose their score, it’s important that they not only write out their score, but also that they copy out the parts onto separate pieces of paper.

Copying out separate parts has practical applications. For one, when the children recruit other children to perform their compositions, they can hand out the parts for the other children to perform. It’s much easier to perform a piece of music when everyone isn’t crowded around the same piece of paper.

Second, just like in a professional orchestra, one child who doesn’t have a part can be the “conductor” and beat time for the other children while reading from the entire score.

Finally, the score can be folded up with the parts and added to your classroom listening library for future generations of children in your classroom to perform.

Now, Ivan's composition “Creepout” for piano, hand drum, and tone bars, will live on in our classroom for years to come.

More later!

Listening Maps in Action

Hey, everyone! Welcome back to the blog. Pursuant to the latest video I posted to the new YouTube channel, I just wanted to share with you a listening map the children in my class made for the Pictures at an Exhibition by Modest Mussorgsky (1835-1881). Listening maps lend themselves so well to multi-age collaboration. Even children from different classes collaborated on this particular project.

The project began in the morning, when Zack reminded me that I had promised him the day before that we’d work on some music that morning. Unfortunately, I had to fill in for another teacher in the other classroom. So I asked Zack if he wanted to join me in that classroom once he’d finished some other work. So we made plans to present the lesson there.

By the time Zack joined me, Desiree, an older child, saw that we were about to do music and wanted to join us, so we invited her. Now I had an 8-year old and a 10-year old in the same lesson. Here we go!

We began with a story about Mussorgsky and the background behind the piece. (You can find my version of the story in Chapter 15 of the book.)

Next, we listened to the piece. Now, Pictures at an Exhibition is quite a long piece, clocking in at about 30 minutes. Don’t feel you have to sit with the children and listen to the entire piece. Feel free to listen to enough of the music to get the gist, or skip through some parts and play the highlights. The point of listening is to get to know the piece really well. You could even ask the children to go to the listening area themselves and listen and make sketches. It all depends on how much time you have and on the length of the children’s attention span. You can find the version we listened to here. I like this version because it shows the original paintings on which Mussorgsky based his composition. I had mixed feelings, though, about showing the children a YouTube video from my phone. Use your own discretion.

Once we’d listened to enough of the piece to get the children fired up, we made a list of the piece’s movements. Then, Zack and Desiree sketched out their game board and started drawing.

As a model for their illustrations, the children used a wonderful illustrated version of the story of the piece by Anna Harwell Celenza, which you can find here.

At this point, I left the children to work on their own. They dove in and worked with such fervor and concentration, it was spectacular to see. Of course, they had some trouble collaborating. Disputes arose over who got to draw what movement, and periodically they corrected each other’s drawings, which sparked some hurt feelings. But with a few Grace & Courtesy lessons they made it through.

Detail of spaces for the movements called Cows and Promenade III. You can see where Zack scribbled over Desiree’s cows because he thought her lines were too clean. This led to about 10 minutes of mediation. That’s the elementary for you.

Desiree adding some color to the work.

The Marketplace, where you can buy candy, popcorn, potatoes, and tomatoes (for 3 euros!).

All together, this work took the entire morning. The children simply disappeared into the work, as if they were in a trance. When they came to, they made this lovely game board. (I didn’t realize at the time, but when I took this photo the game board wasn’t quite finished.)

After they finished the game board, they really wanted to play with it, but the morning work cycle had ended. So, Zack invited Desiree to come up to our classroom and work with it in the afternoon.

So, in the afternoon, Zack and Desiree got together and invited two younger children, Marcus, 7, and Ezekiel, 5 1/2, to join them. After Zack and Desiree gave the others the gist of the story, they all sat down at the table to have a listen to the music and play with their listening map. The tokens they used came from all over the classroom. One child used a ball of clay, another used the black pyramid from the Montessori language material, and another used a green skittle from the Racks & Tubes.

Together, the children listened to the piece and moved their tokens around the game board as the music progressed.

I hope you can see the great potential of listening maps. Listening maps give children a deep understanding of a piece of music, get them thinking about history and art, and, most importantly, they provide children of all ages an opportunity to collaborate together to plan and implement a project.

That’s all for now. More later!

Number One!

I owe everyone a debt of gratitude for making Making Music in Montessori the #1 new release in the Music Appreciation category on Amazon.com. We beat a book bout Bach!

It’s heartwarming to see such enthusiasm for bringing music to the Montessori children of the world. I hope everyone who has ordered a book gets some use out of it. Please feel free to contact me with any questions you may have.

You can also get a copy directly from the publisher Rowman & Littlefield.

Alex's Amazing Musical!

(Forgive me for using the child’s real name, but I think you’ll be able to see it on the score anyway, and, frankly it takes a long time to blur out children’s identities in these photos. I’m sure Alex’s parents won’t object.)

Alex wrote a composition for piano and tone bars as follow up for a lesson on musical form. (The lesson can be found in Making Music in Montessori, the book.) The focus of the lesson was on three-part, ABA form. During the lesson I played for him a minuet from a Haydn symphony, as well as a clip of Paul Robeson singing “Old Man River.” (I had “Old Man River” in my head for days afterward.)

So, Alex first designed his own scale, which he called the “Halloween” scale. Then he used the scale to
compose a three-part composition for tone bars, piano, and percussion. Below you can see his score.

Alex wrote his “amazing musical” in stick notation and standard percussion notation. The piano part is particularly clever. Above the line, in red numbers, he wrote a stick-notated part for the right hand, and below the line, in black, he wrote the stick-notated left hand part.

In these photos you get a good view of Alex’s “Halloween” scale. It’s a six-note scale that actually sounds pretty creeeeepy…

After he brought home the score, Alex’s parents requested a recording of the piece so they could hear it. So, Alex brought the score back to school with him and copied out the individual parts so he could perform it with some other children.

The individual parts. Notice the multi-measure rests.

Next Alex recruited three other children to perform and make a recording of his piece. The players were (not their real names):

Xander, aged 7, on hand drum
Nanette, aged 9, on piano
Rachelle, aged 11, on maracas
Alex, aged 10, on wood block
Michael, aged 48, on tone bars

Although he really wanted to play his tone bar part himself, it fell to me to play the tone bar part because it was pretty difficult and we didn’t have time for Alex to practice it.

Alex was a little disappointed, but he showed great flexibility and just wrote himself a simple part for wood blocks instead. The other children spent the morning practicing their parts, and we recorded the piece in the afternoon.

Regrettably, I don’t have a photo of us performing the piece, since I was absorbed in playing the tone bars, but we used the voice recorder app on my iPhone to do a recording. Here is our rough take. It’s not exactly as written, but what do you expect after only a couple of hours of rehearsal?

After our recording, we filed the score and parts away so that some day in the future, a different group of children can play “Alex’s Amazing Musical.”

The score and parts. Ready to be submitted to Boosey & Hawkes.

So there you have it. When a child writes a score, he can copy out the parts for others to perform. You can even do a recording!

Composing Your Own Score

After a lesson on Naming Scales from the Montessori music album, the children got inspired to write their own music. One child wanted to write his own music for tone bars and percussion.

The first step was to place a scale strip in front of the tone bars and make up a nice melody. In this case, Zachary wrote two melodies, both using the pentatonic scale strip (because the notes of the pentatonic scale sound nice in any combination).

To write his first melody, he placed a pentatonic scale strip with black numbers on the bottom octave of the tone bars. To write the second, he placed another pentatonic scale strip, this one with red numbers, on the top octave (making sure to place the 1 on both scale strips on the same note.)

Next, he wrote his melody out on a large poster-sized score. First he drew an “L” shape on the paper. The left axis indicates the instruments used in the piece (represented in words or cute drawings), the bottom axis denotes the divisions of time (represented simply as an evenly spaced series of numbers from 1 to 8.)

To write his notes, he simply used numbers with no rhythm sticks. One number standing alone signified one sound on a beat (ta) and two numbers close together signified two sounds on a beat (ti-ti). Finally, he wrote out percussion parts in standard percussion notation.

This follow-up can be done by children of all ages. Here’s a first-year working on a piece solely for percussion.

And here are two older children working with a chromatic scale strip. First they’re writing on 3-line staff paper using stick notation. Later they’ll transfer their melodies to a full score.

Procedures for creating a score can be found in the book, or you can download them here.

Have fun making scores with your children! If you have any questions, come and get ahold of me via the contact page.

20-Minute Puppet Show!

On the last day before the October holidays, just when I suspected the children’s energy level was going to be too high for them to be able to concentrate even on their responsibilities, I rallied them together at the end of the day for a 20-minute puppet show! Yes, this entire process took us 20 minutes.

I began by gathering the children in a circle and showing them some puppets I hastily threw together using cut paper and clothespins. This took about 5 minutes.

Ghost! Vampire! Mad Scientist! Skeleton! Jack-O-Lantern! EEEEEeeek!

Thankfully, they liked the puppets. I then divided the children into two groups: One group’s task was to come up with the story and act it out with the puppets.

The writers deliberating.

I gave the second group, “the orchestra”, the task of composing the music for the puppet show. The children chose all the instruments and came up with what music accompanied which character. Because we only had 20 minutes, I didn’t expect them to write out thier ideas. Two of the children decided to improvise at the piano for the duration of the puppet show. (Since it was a celebration of Halloween, they decided to only use the black keys. Oooooo!)

The orchestra getting their parts together.

To write the play and compose the music, I gave the children 10 minutes.

After they were all done and knew what they were going to do, we tipped over a table and performed the show. It was adorable.

The children performing the puppet show. (The puppet on the left is a disembodied hand!)

A still from a video of the show. the orchestra is awaiting their cues. The pianists, however, are watching and improvising.

Of course, I could have had the children make the puppets and design the set, but we only had 20 minutes. There is always room for a puppet show that pulls all the stops. You could take the whole morning, for example, to put on a spectacular puppet show! But the children loved their little 20-minute performance.

So there you have it. You, too, can throw together a 20-minute puppet show with your class. Give the children a few creative limits, let them explore, and you’ll be delighted with the result.

Many more activities like this are available, if you’ll pardon the shameless plug, in the the forthcoming book Making Music in Montessori, which will be out on December 15th, but is available for preorder now on Amazon! Click here to get your copy:

https://www.amazon.com/Making-Music-Montessori-Everything-Classrooms-dp-1475844697/dp/1475844697/ref=mt_other?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=1603497375

More later!

Making Music in Montessori hits retailers on December 15th, 2020!

Hi, everyone!

Back in March I announced that the book Making Music in Montessori was coming out in April, but that, alas was not to be. We had some corrections to make and the COVID epidemic slowed everything down. Now, however, I can happily announce that the book is available NOW for pre-order on Amazon and is slated for a December 15th release date.

I am so very excited to share with all of you the ideas in this book. Head over to Amazon to pre-order now via this link.

As before, after the book comes out, be on the lookout for my Making Music in Montessori YouTube channel, which will be devoted to short videos in which I will present many of the follow up ideas, singing games, music theory, and composition lessons in the book!

Also, feel free to visit the workshop page and send me a message. It would be my great privilege and joy to come to your school and present some of the ideas in the book to the teachers at your school.

More later!

Listening Maps!

The very worthwhile and informative book Making Music in Montessori (outDecember15th2020preorderyourcopy now) introduces in chapter 11 a follow-up idea in which children can construct listening maps for pieces of music in your classroom’s music library. The example used in the book is the "Danse Macabre” by Camille Saint-Saëns. A seven-year-old child in our class created a listening map for that particular piece, and so I thought I’d share it with you.

Here he is working earnestly, taking inspiration from the book Dance Macabre by Anna Harwell-Calenza (details on where to find that book can be found in the aforementioned tome Making Music in Montessori). After listening to the piece and reading through the story, he and I talked through the events of the piece. Then he set to work drawing a big snaking track on a piece of large poster paper.

Next, he filled in the spaces on the track with sequential drawings that correspond to events in the music. I helped him sketch out some of the ghosts and skeletons on his listening map, but only as a model. He did most of the drawing, as you can see from this drawing of Mr. Death.

I love how Mr. Death’s head is too small for his huge hood.

Here’s another detail. I don’t know how those ghosts can get their spectral hands around the neck of the cello.

And here’s the finished map. All he needs to do now is add some color.

When it’s finished, this listening map will go into our classroom library so that other children can listen to Dance Macabre and follow along.

Making Music in Montessori hits retailers on April 15th, 2020!

Wow! I can’t believe that after starting this book in 2015 I’m finally able to announce that it will hit shelves on December 15th, 2020!

In the meantime, you can preorder your copy on Amazon via this link.

After the book comes out, be on the lookout for my Making Music in Montessori YouTube channel, which will be devoted to short videos in which I will present many of the follow up ideas, singing games, music theory, and composition lessons in the book!

Also, feel free to visit the workshop page and send me a message. It would be my great privilege and joy to come to your school and present some of the ideas in the book to the teachers at your school.

More later!