Submitted by Margaret Swarts, Canton, Georgia
Idea posted October 12, 2004
Our fourth graders study a unit about sound in their science class in the regular classroom. They are then required to create an original instrument. To correlate the music and science curriculum, I use the Microsoft Musical Instrument CD-ROM as a game.
The InFocus Projector is connected to the laptop, with external speakers so all the students in the room can hear the sounds and see the instruments simultaneously. In their journals (or you could use index cards), they write these methods of sound production:
- strike
- shake
- scrape
- bow
- blow and
- pluck/strum
They work together in four groups, which are predetermined in my room by which color line they sit on (which are musical family names - woodwinds, strings, brass, and percussion). With the CD-ROM, I use the A-Z instrument section and the "Next" choice rather than the "Random" button.
I click on the pronunciation, then the sound, and the students can read some of the information that is listed about that instrument. They use tally marks to count which instruments use which method of sound production. After about ten instruments, we stop and check to see how well each group did. We usually have time to repeat this at least once or twice in a forty-minute class period.
I prefaced this lesson with "The Heart Of America" from Music K-8, Vol. 11, No. 3 and Boomwhackers®, also relating it to sound and the scale.