6th+Grade+Instrumental+Lesson

National Standards: Create: Plan and Make, Evaluate and Refine, Present. Primary Focus: Correct notes, rhythmic differences Objective: Students will create a variation given a melody under certain limitations and guidelines. Assessment: Informal

Activity and Sequence:

This activity is based on an exercise I found in the standard of excellence book that we work out of with our 6th grade students. Students are presented a simple melody (In this case it was twinkle twinkle little star, but it can be any simple folk song or something the students will have heard before). Have the students play the melody and ask them if it is familiar to them. Proceed to ask students if they can define the word ‘variation’ in a musical context. (If they aren’t sure try giving them some pushing hints, maybe explain it in the context of a ‘remix’ with more modern tunes). After students are comfortable with the term, present them with a piece of blank staff paper and let them know that they will be composing a variation of their own.

I find that students (and I as the teacher) can get bogged down with the weekly routine of lessons and the fact that it becomes predictable and boring. This activity gives students the opportunity to create and think about music in a way they may not have before. (I actually had a student say “Yay we get to create something!”) The guidelines I set for my students were: Use the same melody (pitches), but vary the rhythm. We still need to hear the ‘twinkle twinkle melody’, but change the rhythm so that it becomes a variation. I then presented an example that I created and let them know that it can be as complicated or as simple as they wanted. THERE ARE NO WRONG ANSWERS, after all-they are the composers. Have students take the assignment home and bring it for next week’s lesson. (To make it easier on the students I wrote in the clef, time signature, key signature and bar lines)

I guarantee that when students come back with their composition at least one of them will play something completely different than what they wrote, but that’s alright! I used this situation as a teaching moment and helped students understand what they could fix to notate it how they actually played it. Hopefully this will also instill that music does have some sort of structure, and in order to create something solid we have to have these foundational skills (knowing that time signature matters considering that this is a rhythmic adjustment to the theme).

After all final adjustments have been made with the notation, play the variation! In most of my lessons I have 2 or more students, so after they played their individual variation I had them switch so that they would play the other person’s variation.