Music in Film and Garage Band Stories

Last year I used Garage Band in my classroom for the first time and had students compose their own music to accompany a story that they had written. Here is the post about that project: Musique Concrete


This year I varied the project slightly. Instead of studying Musique Concrete, we studied Music In Film. I found a bunch of great lesson ideas online and kind of combined them to make one big project. We started by learning that there are 4 main uses of music in movies: to set the time and place, to convey/describe characters and ideas, to create a mood or atmosphere, or to express emotions. We also learned about Mickey-Mousing (creating sound effects). Then we talked about the different elements of music (instrumentation, timbre, rhythm, etc.) and how we can vary them to create different ideas. We watched several YouTube clips to show the importance of music and how it can demonstrate the 5 main uses listed above. After we were comfortable with all of these elements, we used Garage Band to record a story and then create music to accompany it. The stories we used were all short children's books. I was completely blown away with some of the finished projects. The students went above and beyond even what I could do. Here is the assignment they were given to fill out and I've also attached one of the completed stories.

Check this out!!   The Pied Piper





Rhythm Practice

Here are two games I use to help my K-2nd graders practice rhythms. In Kindergarten we used giant beat strips and then notated ta and ti-ti rhythms with our shoes! This really helped us visualize the different number of sounds on each beat. I'll use this with my older students as well because they never seem to remember how many beats each note gets!

I also like to use caterpillar rhythms. I have a bunch of circles with different rhythms notated on them. I often have them work with a partner to create a 4 beat rhythm and then combine with another group to create an 8-beat rhythm. Sometimes we put 4 groups together to create 16 beats. When we use half notes, we put the circle next to it upside down so that we see it takes up two circles.

Mr. Stretchy

I recently purchased a stretchy band for my classroom and my students are in love with "Mr. Stretchy"! It has been great for my lower grades and especially for my adaptive music class. Here are some pictures of us doing a routine to "March" from Artie Almeida's book, Parachutes, Ribbons, and Scarves, Oh My!.

Solfeg Games

Here are two games I use for practicing our solfeg patterns for So-Mi and So-Mi-Do.


The S-M game uses a pack of ice cream bulletin board cut outs I bought from Amazon. On the ice cream I drew three lines and then drew different S-M patterns on them. They had to match them to the cone that had the matching pattern.

The So-Mi-Do game was very similar, only I used a picture of a fly that I found and I wrote different SMD patterns on those. Then I made copies of my SMD flashcards, shrunk them, and printed them off on colored paper. Working with a partner, the students had to flip over a flashcard and swat the fly that matched the flashcard with a fly swatter. This was a lot of fun!