Upper Elementary Kids are TOO COOL
Movement Composition Project
One thing I hear in music teaching chatter is that “my upper elementary kids are too cool and won’t participate and have terrible attitudes and don’t want to do anything!” It’s true that students at this age (10-11 years old) are beginning to form identities in which they are deciding what they like… but also what they DON’T like. In many ways they are fearful of being vulnerable and are beginning to be quite comfortable pushing back on authority. This can be a struggle! I am super proud of the project we completed last year in my 5th grade general music class and I’m excited to share it with you here. But first…
Housekeeping:
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Conceiving of a Dalcroze-based music program and developing it from the ground up has afforded me the opportunity to see thing through on a multi-year trajectory. What does a culminating project look like after 4 or 5 years of heavily Dalcroze-based instruction? What can the kids “do” after this arc? I know they are deeply prepared for their secondary programs and able to demonstrate very strong musical instincts, but it’s hard to measure their progress through normal metrics. The Dalcroze approach has some slightly different goals and values that make it special, but also sometimes a “square peg in a round hole.”
It occurred to me that, if the body is the instrument that I’m teaching, the students should be able to use this instrument to compose music. Instead of thinking of music composition as a formula, a series of rules that we puzzle together in various ways to create art, we can use the body to simply compose free of these constraints. Dalcroze activities involve a ton of improvisation, and through plastique animèe we find an avenue for analysis. Why not composition?
I began by giving the students a more concrete way to discuss gesture and movement vocabulary. The Laban Efforts are a perfect way to make these gestures objective, and to bring some structure to our discussions. I thought it would be easier to be creative with composition if we had a set of “words” with which to communicate what we wanted to express. I have written much about the Laban Efforts and the ways in which I find them useful. Make sure you’re a TEAMM member to access all of those lessons in the ARCHIVE.
Once we had a good foundation from the Laban Efforts, we found various ways to use them and explore the expressive possibilities. The students played with dynamics, meter, form, and phrasing with the efforts as the basis. We explored mixed and odd meters, just to provide the students a broad palate with which to paint. Once I felt like the students were using their movements freely and naturally, we began to collaborate on a composition. (Check out the video below!)