 The music you just heard was completely composed by a grade 5 music student. The example above shows advanced features of changing time signatures, extra notation, dotted rhythms and it's even written to show people places or ideas. This presentation is about storytelling through music and the journey that myself and my students went on will show you how we are inspired to compose and create with books, poems and fairy tales. My name is Samuel Wright. I work at Tejon Christian International School. Everything I do comes from an off approach. I integrate technology with recorder, with singing, with dancing and with movement. My classroom and my students is very traditional. We have notation, we do harmony, we use laptops, we hand write melodies but everything is based upon us physically doing and being a part of the music. I want my students to internalize rhythm, pitch, texture, beat, pulse and I use any tool I can find to put through the idea that music can be spontaneous and have a pattern or structure. I use iPad apps that show melodic shape and contour as well as structure or form and repetition. I then use a series of activities where my students have to draw melodies, engage with famous pieces such as Carnival of the Animals or Peter and the Wolf but they have to create their own music from it. Improvisation is a huge part of my lessons as well as the students making e-portfolios. I use Book Creator and iBooks Author as well as a few other methods to photograph and video my students in the lesson. This video will demonstrate to you the journey my students went on as they read stories, legends and poems, interpreted them in musical form and then went and created amazing compositions from these pieces of literature. I then took all of their work and put it into an iTunes U course that you can enroll in. This course goes through our entire lesson plan. It goes through the creative experiences we undertook and it also shows exemplars in iBooks where I've had previous students compose themes and melodies for paintings, for drawings and for, in the case of my four-year-old, his own story. So let's dive in and I'll show you how my students composed and created with the text and materials that we chose. What I have found a very powerful way to engage students is to give them a model, show them examples of high levels of creativity examples where they can engage, dance, sing and move with music from other cultures, tie it to stories, tie it to a legend inspire them and then turn around and give them the tools, the language the techniques that they can use to turn this into their own creation and that is what I've done with the fairy tale compositions. Take this story for example. Let's say there is a lady, she loves playing the violin she's a princess as all fairy tales show but then one day this princess is turned into a dragon why? we don't know but that's part of the story and then as everyone can guess a knight comes along to fight the dragon because that's what knights do but what if that knight found out it was really the princess and instead he proposed to the dragon the dragon liking this proposal accepts and instantly is turned back into a princess throughout all of this the students have five different stages of transformation these five stages can then be used to create a melody a rhythm, a different texture or a different type of music to represent change what I do as the teacher is I collect a series of songs dances or rhythms and with each level of change I introduce this new element the students quickly make the connection that they too can use these types of rhythms melodies or textures to compose their own creations and that's what we did beyond the core arts and more with a focus on transliteracy or as I like to call it transfer skills is very important when creating in music what my students here have shown and when you log into the iTunes U course is that they were able to successfully take the language, the text and the natural rhythm or pitch that they heard in those texts and translate it into composition let me play you a few examples of their feedback to each other which was part of the final reflection task they all sat in a panel like a television show and gave each other feedback one great thing and one area for improvement it is also based on literate writing hood and then the part I liked about Erin's is that she had patterns that continues and I think she should improve on putting more variety of notes what I loved about this student's reflection was how they looked at the two aspects of the notes and the patterns which was a huge part of the music we engaged with the lyric tale of little red writing hood and the thing that I liked about his music is the huncher it had the tempo and the speed it was fast since the story got more nervous and also things that he should improve is that when he wrote his music that mostly every music had intervals of thirds and I think he should make more different patterns than notes on his music this student's reflection was very powerful it showed her subjective response how she felt and how effectively the student composed for the characters or the themes in the story but it also showed her developing musical knowledge she used terms like composing with thirds this is advanced knowledge for a grade 5 student but by looking at different compositions or different melodies and rhythms from around the world the vocabulary and the skills of these students was enhanced so when they went to create they had a large palette of language, terminology and skills for creating so let's get stuck into it what's the first thing we did as a class listening to different models we found out very quickly we needed good melody writing skills when we read the book The Empty Pot by Demi we found there were key protagonists such as Ping the little boy and if we wrote a melody that was just his whenever his name came up we could associate that melody with the character we looked at Pacini's use of an ancient Chinese tune and its pentatonic pattern and then what we did is we sang it we used solfege we cut it up we sang it backwards we played it we danced to it we even wrote our own class theme for Ping and here it is each student then took the same process that Pacini did for his opera turandot reverse engineered the melody as well as using samples of Chinese scales and they were able to compose each five separate melodies for Ping, for the flowers, for the empty pot for the father, the emperor and children when we did our dancing activities and when we did our drawing of melodic contours in the air the students found out some patterns could be repeated some patterns could go up and some could go down and then by using the model of Pacini using that Chinese melody the students found out that composers approach things very differently it's not like they sit down and magic music filters down through their brain and they can write it but they started from a model they researched, they created, they improvised and they came up with amazing creative melodies now I'm going to play the Jiao melody over the top of Broken Board Dune by Louis so I do this the second part of our journey was where we looked at rhythm I broke it down by using a poem we did table drumming we did dividing of the beats we did notation but the actually exciting part was where we got to read a poem and the students were able to take the words from the poem and create rhythm patterns out of those words we looked at a book The Earth Under Sky Bear's Feet we read through a few of the poems and the students decided to use the one called Sky Bear it had the most characters it had protagonists it had a lovely ending and the illustration was beautiful the students commented that it helped them create music as soon as I got the students to create their patterns from the words of the poem we looked at time signatures we looked at changing the meter we looked at changing the emphasis of words and the students then created their own soundscapes visually as well as verbally which we then able to transfer to iPads and the students could create different textures of rhythm in the smart strings in the piano or then in body percussion and with the AUF instruments one game we particularly enjoyed playing was called Complementary Rhythms This brought upon a very exciting time because the students could then bring out their iPads they had the skills they had the language they had everything they needed and now I gave them an iPad with GarageBand and I showed them in a class setting how they could play orchestral strings they could change the piano, the mode, the scale they could actually then play a bass guitar they could use a guitar pattern and sing their melody over the top they could body percussion all of the rhythms they had just done in the game using the sampler and GarageBand and then add in their melody again on top what this meant was instead of the students spending so much time trying to figure out sounds and trying to find a melody they had their melodies they had their ideas and now they could interpret them for the narratives, for the poems and it became very exciting as you can see the students would have their iPads and they'd have their music next to it and they'd be making up string accompaniment parts for their melody or weird synthesizer type melodies for something scary So to start this process off what we did is we all sat down with our iPads we opened GarageBand and I picked some kids' names out of the class I had Tyler the Terrible and Aaron the Great and we made up our own fairy tale like the dragon tale before and what the students had to do was draw the contour of the melody they thought a scary or heroic kingly person would sound like and then as a class we figured out how do you notate with GarageBand what directions do you put on your score when you're writing for GarageBand and this is what we came up with By providing the students with a way of notating what they came up with but also putting the performance directions for GarageBand on their score the students could now orchestrate their melodies, their rhythms, their patterns for their chosen fairy tale with great ease and with so much more creativity and freedom so students chose their tortoise and their hair red writing hood they had pizzicato strings body percussion and they even had high first violins or electric and distorted guitars now as you go through the iTunes U course at each stage of pitch, rhythm and textures you will find student work samples analyse these yourself go through them with your kids because these are the final compositions my students came up with I've been using Sibelius to turn the students scores into video but you could do the same and the video is in iTunes U showing how to do that the final thing I want to share with you are my students reflections I needed to evaluate how much my students had grown in their musical knowledge along this creation journey how much of the language had they understood about protagonists and characters and poems how much had they applied this to their own learning so what we did is we got into a series of television panels where the students critiqued each other's compositions and they had to give, as I said before one great thing and one thing to improve on let me show you three examples from our live panel of reviewers and this story is about the writing hood and the part that he put sharps in the wolf part so it could be more scarier and I think she was successful on writing the whole music but characteristics and I think she can improve on writing more music about the scenery it was based on the fairytale three little pigs and the music he showed me was about the first pig and the thing I liked about his was that it was the notes where it fit together very well so that it would sound like the lazy personality of the first pig Eva and it's the little red writing hood and the good part of what she did is she put pizzicatos in every music and she made it colorful the one thing I want to recommend her is to kind of make her wolf a little bit longer because it was extremely short all of my students enjoyed this creative journey they enjoyed the literature that I chose as well the empty pot for Chinese music sky bear poem for North American Indigenous music we also used ukuleles and played pieces from Hawaii so that my students could look at harmony and how triads work and all of this transferred beautifully to when we brought in the iPads and technology the students understood what the buttons the keys the chords meant and they were better equipped they had the language and skills needed to compose and create for the poem and the narratives we then presented it all at the PYP Grade 5 exhibition