Annabelle Porter

ARTS 100

15 December

Interdisciplinary Project

I worked with Justin Thornton to create a creative experience for students at Young

Children’s Program to learn about composition. Justin and I are both Music Education majors

and wanted to provide the students with an activity that would not only be very interactive, but as

well as a fun experimental activity for us as future educators. To teach the children about

composition, we had to think of an easy way to educate them about beats. We thought as a

collective unit that using a word that had two beats and a word with one beat would be a good

way of explaining it. To do so we printed off pictures of Santa and of a tree to keep with the

holiday festivities; however, after arriving we were told that Santa was too closely related to

Christmas and that we needed to change it to another picture. We did so accordingly to

Snowflake and found it a very interesting and good experience to change our lesson plan on the

fly.

When enunciating Snowflake, it has two distinct beats: Snow-flake. For tree, it has one

beat: Tree. We simplified beats to sounds so that they would better to be able to understand it.

Simultaneously Justin and I would speak the words while clapping on the inflections of the word.

After doing it a few times for the children, we would ask for them to join in with us. Upon being

confident with the task, we asked for them to arrange the pictures differently and clap the new

rhythm to the song Sleigh Ride. The children not only found it very fascinating, but as well as

very engaging.
 Following the activity, we explained to the kids that they were composing new songs to

Sleigh Ride through rhythm and that they were now composers. Many of the children in the

classroom have parents who teach at JMU, and some of which are faculty in the school of music.

It was very amusing to see the correlation of the student’s relationship with their parents to our

activity. Overall, it was a very good experience for both Justin and I as future music educators

and we greatly appreciate the opportunity to do so.