Introduction to the Series of Lessons

I did my student teaching in the general elementary classroom of Mrs. Kara Kurzeja at
Bennet Woods Elementary in Okemos, MI. The students who participated in this project were
all fourth graders from four fourth grade classrooms at Bennet Woods Elementary. Each class
that participated in this projected consisted of around 21 students between the ages of 9 and
10. The classes that participated in this lesson have music one to two times a week.
Within the General Music Curriculum, Mrs. Kurzeja uses Music Learning Theory as the
main foundation of her music classroom teaching. Students that have been in Mrs. Kurzeja’s
class for several years have had experience using their singing voice, singing basslines, singing
and echoing tonal patterns, chanting and echoing rhythm patterns, identifying meter,
identifying micro and macro beat, identifying major and minor. Within this classroom students
have gained experience playing a variety of instruments such as hand drums, boomwhackers,
triangles, wood blocks, xylophones, ukulele, and recorder. However, in recent years because of
the pandemic some students have either less experience or are less comfortable on some of
the concepts or instruments. The beginning portion of the fourth-grade year was spent
focusing on going over and preparing for a field trip to visit their school districts marching band
as well as reviewing concepts from last year. Between learning concepts for the field trip, I
began to scaffold some of my lessons in preparation for my STP project. I spent several lesson
going over concepts about how to play the different sounds on the hand drum, ostinatos, bass
lines on a xylophone, chord roots, melodies, and improvising.
My main learning goal for the series of lessons is for students to create and perform
their own original composition using a two to four beat ostinato on an instrument, a bass line
on a xylophone, and an improvised a melody. The learning goal can be simplified into three
parts: to encourage student comfort with music concepts and percussive instruments, to
encourage student led learning in the music classroom, encourage student individual creation
and group creation in the music classroom.
In these lesson students will be involved with music creation, performing on a variety of
instrument, improvising a melody, and assessing what was created musically. Students will
achieve creation by composing their own ostinatos on hand drums or percussion instruments,
basslines on xylophones. They will be improvising on xylophones after they have created their
basslines and ostinatos. They will be practicing and performing their compositions for their
teacher and peers within each lesson and have the option to perform their final project for their
peers. Students will assess their compositions and their peers composition through positive self
and peer feedback and complete a reflection self- assessment.