As the founding music teacher at a prominent charter school in Harlem, NYC I have had the great fortune of creating at least one new curriculum from scratch every school year. Consequently my fourth grade students, whom opened the school as first graders, have become the musical guinea pigs.
At the beginning of this school year the teachers of the "special" subjects proposed a program to our principal in which the fourth graders select one elective special to study intensively throughout the school year. 24 students elected music and meet with me last period every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Two periods a week are dedicated to beginning band but the remaining two periods a week are dedicated to my ever evolving general music curriculum.
The first half of the school year has been focused on music literacy with students primarily studying the ukulele. Both the students and myself are growing tired of the ukes and are ready to jump into a new unit. Therefore today I launch a unit that has been stewing deep down for over a year.
Today we dive into...
(Drum Roll Please)
GarageBand!
The school does not have a computer lab, instead we use a rolling MacBook cart that travels from classroom to classroom. The initial week or two of the curriculum will be devoted to teaching the routines and procedures of set-up and pack-up of the laptops. A rough sketch of the remaining unit is as follows:
-Early to Mid-February: Introduction of loops. Students experiment with creating beats and grooves.
-Late-February to Mid-March: Composition. Students begin using their beats and grooves created with loops to create original compositions. Live tracks of either voices or their band instruments are layered in to create brief compositions.
-Late-March to Late-April: If students aren't totally bored at this point I hope to bring in iMovie and introduce the students to basic film scoring.
I plan to document every rocky step, so stay tuned for the next installment of The Great Fourth Grade Experiment!
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