At Lotus, we have a lot of students who take what we refer to as general music classes—exploring elements of music through games, singing, movement, exploration, etc., rather than focusing on instruction on just one instrument. This allows students who may not be ready for traditional instrumental music instruction, or just prefer a more exploratory approach, to enjoy music making and learning. That said, we are purposeful about skill building, and try to find the balance between taking a relaxed approach and still having clear pedagogical goals.
While every student is different, there are some types of activities that we find generally work well with students who are taking general music classes. Here are a few:
Everyone at Lotus knows the
“Do Do Do” tapping song—it’s one of our most-used tools for teaching pitch to students who need a highly adaptive approach. Tapping on our bodies in an ascending line as the scale goes up provides a visual and kinaesthetic experience of pitches moving up and down. It’s also a great entry point to learning the pitches. From there, we often move to learning colours to correspond with the pitches (we use the same colours as boomwhackers). We use cards with a coloured circle that allow us to create patterns that the student can play on any coloured instrument, or you can use non-coloured instruments and just put on stickers (we use plain white label stickers and colour them). This allows students to learn to play a tune easily. Here’s Hot Cross Buns as an example.
Movement is such an intuitive way to experience music. And it can facilitate learning of so many musical elements—dynamics, rhythm, form, and more! It can also meet sensory needs and provide an opportunity for kinaesthetic learning. Movement is also so adaptable-more or less movement or different types of movement can be added, taken away, or substituted to meet the needs of the student without compromising any of the learning. Check out this blog article for some ways to incorporate gross motor movement, and this Teacher to Teacher video for a demo of one our favourite movement activities, Treasure Hunt!
The opportunity to explore different instruments is a fun activity that most students love! Many percussion instruments are relatively inexpensive and easy to incorporate into your studio or classroom. If you’re lucky enough to have other instruments, they’re all fair game! By playing different instruments, students learn about different timbres and have a tactile experience, with many enjoying the different vibrations that instruments make or doing things like talking into the bell of a brass instrument. If you don’t have a lot of instruments on hand, you can use pictures of instruments and match them to the sound on a short recording of a solo instrument.
This can take a lot of different forms. We love the book Sounds and Stories Together by Sally Guerrero. It provides a lot of ideas on how to bring musical storytelling into your classroom. If your student enjoys creating their own story, you can do that together and compose sounds to go along with the stories (having different percussion instruments is great here, especially things like a rainstick or thunder tube!). We’re also big fans of Barefoot Books! Their Singalong Books are beautifully done and are a favourite of almost all of our students.
These are just a few ideas for creating engaging general music classes…the possibilities are endless! This is a fantastic way to provide a well-rounded approach to music learning for students who require an adaptive approach.
Happy teaching!
