Year 1

Unit 6 – Composition

Activity 1 – Composing using Graphic Notation

The teacher shows the students how some symbols are used to represent different sounds. This would give them an idea of how to notate music in a number of different ways. This is done by showing one symbol at a time. The teacher draws the chart on the handout onto the board and asks the students to make those sounds, using their voices or other instruments. When students are familiar with the symbols and their meanings, the teacher draws a 4×4 grid onto the board and fills it with symbols, leaving out some squares blank; these represent silence or rests.
The grid should be read from left to right. The teacher points at each of the symbols and asks the students to make the appropriate sounds on their instruments. The students can now make up their own compositions by filling in a blank grid with symbols. They can then draw this filled-in grid on the board, and the children can play each other’s tunes.


Activity 2 – Little Miss Muffet

Students are exposed to and learn how to improvise on instruments to audio-visual experiences. The teacher can choose a story and adapt the instruments to be used accordingly. S/he mentions the main characters of the story, shows and sounds the instruments to be used during the narration. Reference is made to the sounds of the environment, including playing music and displaying art and theme pictures. The teacher leads a discussion on the story and the instruments which will be used to depict the main characters. The students can thus choose an instrument that matches or depicts a particular character or situation. The teacher relates the story, and the children play their instrument in due time, improvising the sounds and portraying the characters on the different instruments, using variation of tempo and change in pitch.
A colouring page related to the story is given to the students towards the end of the lesson. When composing a nursery rhyme, students can be divided into four groups, so that each group would focus on their particular line taken from the nursery rhyme. Thus each group relates instruments to their line and a performance made up of the students’ own ideas and original compositions is created.

Little Miss Muffet – choir
Little Miss Muffet – instrumental