HAPPY BOOK WEEK 2021!
How do you celebrate book week in your music rooms?
This year’s Book Week theme of “Old Worlds, New Worlds, Other Worlds” is perfect for exploring sound and making music.
An easy and fun project for you and your students is to try the following:
- Choose a picture book (something with inspiring pictures and not too many words)
- IMPROVISE – Read through the book with your students and start to explore ideas for adding sound – ask students for their ideas
- EXPLORE – Give student groups a page of text and ask them to explore a range tuned and non-tuned percussion sounds to bring their page to life
- COMPOSE – Groups work together to create a simple instrumental composition to tell their part of the story, make sure you allow them enough time to practice – do they want to add movement as well?
- PERFORM – Organise your groups to present their compositions in the same order of the story (perhaps with a narrator).
- SHARE – We love sharing our book week compositions with our Kindy and Pre-primary students as they love audio stories.
Check out just some of the books you could use for your own Picture Book Composition projects.
My new favourite book for composition work is a beautiful First Nations story, originally published in 2007.
“You and Me; Our Place” by Leonie Norrington & Dee Huxley
Leonie Norrington’s beautiful text and Dee Huxley’s lush, vibrant illustrations create a world in which the old and new cultures exist comfortably together and children move easily between them. (Blurb taken from book)
We acknowledge and pay our respects to you both Leonie and Dee and thank them for sharing their stories and art with the world.
