OBSERVE: Engineering Design Process Lesson 1

As an ArtsBridge Scholar, I've been thinking a lot about cross-discipline integration. My purpose in coming to teach at Edgemont Elementary is to integrate the arts- specifically music- into the everyday classroom. Mrs. Amesse has been wonderful in giving me a lot of freedom to decide what that means to me and how to approach Music Integration. She gave me the suggestion to focus on integrating music and science, since that is one of the major focuses in the first grade classroom this semester.

As I've developed my plan for the semester, I want to be careful not to undervalue either discipline. I don't want to use music merely as a vehicle for teaching science; I believe music is important and valuable in and of itself, and that the students' lives will be enriched by learning how to understand and interact with music. At the same time, I believe what the esteemed music educator Bennett Reimer said about integration (though he preferred the term interrelation):

"...understandings about music are deepened and broadened when related to other human endeavors both similar (although not identical) and different."

I have developed a series of lessons integrating Science and Music in a way that I feel honors both disciplines, helping the children increase their understanding in both domains. This lesson sequence is based around the Engineering Design Process.

The Engineering Design Process is one of the things Edgemont Elementary focuses on in their science curriculum. It is similar to the Scientific Method, but with a few clear differences. Through these integrated lessons, students will learn about and apply each step of the Engineering Design process in musical ways, increasing their understanding of both Science and Music.

 Each lesson will center around one step of the Engineering Design Process, using musical activities to help the students EXPERIENCE each concept.

Lesson One was all about Observation, which we defined as "Looking and Listening."

Click HERE to view the complete lesson plan for Lesson 1: OBSERVE.

This lesson used a Music Map- a way of iconically representing how music sounds- to give the first graders experience with the concept of observation. This video demonstrates how Music Maps work (and it is the same piece of music, Coppelia Waltz, that I used in my lesson)

The idea of a Music Map is that it LOOKS like the music SOUNDS. The purpose of using a Music Map in this lesson was to encourage the children to use multiple senses- particularly their ears and eyes- to observe and make connections about what was happening.

After showing the music map, I asked the children what they had observed, and it was amazing to see how well they understood.

"You followed the music!" one child said. "You listen with your ears and you look at it, so you can follow it! We look at the lines so we could follow the music!" It made me smile to see how excited he was about his discovery.

"I noticed that you followed along, and the music went exactly where the lines were," said another student.

They also noticed patterns, parts that went fast, parts that went slow... after giving the students a few chances to practice, I called a volunteer up to be the pointer so I could do some observing myself and assess the class. By watching them, I was encouraged to see that most of the kids were getting it; they were understanding the link between the music and the map, and this showed in their actions as well as the comments they made.

This is just the first step, of course. Additional lessons to come will teach more about what to do with the observations they made. I'm looking forward to teaching the rest of the steps in this Engineering Design Process!

Getting to Know the Kids: Hickety Tickety and Al Citron

My next visit to Mrs. Amesse's class was to get to know the kids - and of course, we had to do so with music!

The Room

Mrs. Amesse has a nice, large classroom with plenty of space for kids to move, learn, and grow. I took some pictures of the room after a day of "indoor recess" due to cold, rainy weather, so the kids had been playing with lots of puzzles, blocks, etc. What fun!

There's a place for desks...

A great Smartboard setup....

A garden station where the kids have been growing their own plants from seeds for science...

And my favorite part of the room, a large floor area with lots of room for everyone to sit on the colorful rug!

For this lesson, we spent our time on the rug, playing a get to know you game called Hickety Tickey and another called Al Citron.

Hickety Tickety

This is a great music game to play with young children! The tune is simple, short, and easy to learn. There are two basic ways to teach a new song in Elementary Music: "By Note" or "By Rote." Teaching"By Rote" comes in two forms: phrase-by-phrase or immersion. For a short song like this, immersion is preferable. One of the fundamental requirements of teaching by rote is that you give the children a chance to hear the song ALL THE WAY THROUGH at least THREE TIMES before asking them to sing it themselves. The three repetitions give the children a chance to become familiar with the song, or 'get it in their ears,' before being asked to sing it. The tricky part is, children have short attention spans and will quickly become bored if you just sing to them over and over again! 

The solution to this problem is to keep the children's attention AND help them learn the song more efficiently by asking discovery questions. These can be very simple, but they really work! Here are some discovery questions I used:

"What question am I asking in this song?"

"Will you raise your hand when you hear the lowest note in this song?"

The key to success with discovery questions is to ask them BEFORE each repetition of the song. This is a classic example of teaching through problem solving: you present a challenge or problem, and kids can't help but try to solve it. It's human nature. Asking a discovery question before you sing draws their focus, so they really listen as you sing to them. Discovery questions are a great way to get in disguised repetitions (which are exactly what they sound like). Disguised repetitions make all the difference in teaching a song by rote- and they continue to be important all the way through secondary grades and ensembles, as well!

Another good technique for keeping children engaged and listening as they learn a new song is to involve them kinesthetically. I did this by having them keep the beat with me while I sang. We kept the beat by tapping the ground lightly with the fingertips- not heavy, not hard, just a light tapping. Children are naturally musical (they might not know it, but all children have some music in them!) and I didn't have to explain to them "This is the beat, this is how often to tap," etc. I just modeled it for them and they jumped right in. No need to overcomplicate things. 

After tapping along with me, answering discovery questions, and listening to the song all the way through three times, the children were ready to sing along. They jumped in eagerly and sang along with me: "Hickety Tickety bickety bame, will you please tell me your name?" We went in around the circle to each child, pointing with two hands like an arrow to avoid making anyone feel uncomfortable with pointing fingers. Each child said his or her name, and then we repeated all the children's names in order. This was extremely helpful for me! I got lots of repetitions and lots of chances to learn the names of each child, and they had a lot of fun tapping, pointing, and singing along while developing their musical abilities.

Al Citron

The second game we played was one that I'll probably save for older children in the future. Although keeping the beat by tapping their fingers on the carpet was no problem for these first-graders, taking it to the next level was quite a challenge! In Al Citron, children keep the beat by passing an object (in this case, a small plastic cup held upside down) to their neighbor in time with the music. Grab, pass, grab, pass, grab, pass, on each beat. The children knew were the beat was, but keeping everyone coordinated enough to pass and grab and get a cup FROM your neighbor, then pass it TO the next neighbor, in time with the music, was pretty overwhelming for them! One cup had a small star on the bottom; the intention was to sing the song multiple times and I would guess the name of the child who ended up with the starred cup. Despite numerous cup pile-ups, we did make it through the song and the children seemed to enjoy it. The objective of learning names was accomplished, and the kids had fun, but I don't feel that this song was an effective music teaching experience. Next time I'm playing musical get to know you games, I'll look for a more appropriate intermediary step, a way to up the difficulty level from Hickety Tickety enough to challenge the first graders without overwhelming them.