Here
is series of lessons that has a structure and running
order which might make this a useful unit to run in conjunction with a
science and social literacy study of sound and acoustics. It
wouldn't be difficult to find other appropriate learning areas. I've
presented it through the eyes of a fictitious teacher. I hope this idea
works for you!
Middle through
Upper Primary
A description of the unit
Through questions, discussion and
student tasks this unit introduces and contrasts two terms fundamental
to involvement in activities involving sound, that is 'Listening' and
'Hearing'.
Anticipated learning outcomes
As a result of studying this unit
students should demonstrate
the
knowledge and understanding that
- receiving sound depends on our
sense of hearing
- hearing goes with having ears, but
does not necessary imply awareness
- listening involves active
participation and awareness in aural activity
- our brains are able to block out
sounds we do not wish to hear
- sound and silence may occur
naturally, environmentally, randomly
- sound and silence are
interdependent
- silence is the absence of sound
- sound exists in time and may have
pitch, texture, power (dynamics) and timbre (tone colour)
- sound and silence may be
manipulated deliberately
- using contrasting and repetitive
themes and ideas helps to unify an art work: about tension and
release, or repetition and contrast, patterns
- sound may be recorded, and how:
aurally, graphically as notation, or mechanically
- creative culturally manipulated
sound may be re-created through performance
- sound may be deliberately created
in a number of different ways
- sound makers, as musical
instruments, belong to families
- how these families of instruments
are organised depends on the reasons for organising them
the
ability to
- distinguish between listening and
hearing
- listen discriminately and
sensitively to sounds, both random and organised
- identify which are cultural and
which are natural
- discuss/write about what defines
cultural/natural sound
- describe sounds aurally/in writing
- map and organise sequences of
sound aurally, graphically
- represent sounds graphically as
symbols which illustrate the various properties of sound (such as
duration, pitch, power)
- by employing repetitive and
contrasting themes in a sound sequence, effectively arrange sound and
silence in a sound and silence sequence
- map and graphically record sound
sequences in time to be re-created in subsequent performance
- make decisions about and create
and manufacture effective sound makers
- incorporate these sound makers in
the creation of sound sculptures
Work Requirements
Students should undertake the
following tasks
- listen to, list and/or record
environmental sounds heard in the school grounds
- map sounds heard graphically and
recreate them in a performance
- write a paragraph recording their
participation in the unit.
Resources
- White and/or black board/ or
Overhead Projector
- Prepared audio-tape of
pre-recorded sounds
- Ear plugs (these must be the
correct plugs, and new and hygenically clean. They must not be shared.)
- White or
blackboard
- Students' Music Journals
- Tape-recorders (not
essential)
- Butchers' Paper '(Newsprint) and
Textas (Felt-tipped marking pens)
- Butchers paper and textas
- White or blackboards
- Sound makers
Assessment
Active participation as a class
member, in the unit, particularly in collection, discussion and
performance, of written journal record of unit.
Organisation of the lessons
Notice that the organisation of the
lessons themselves is more like a social literacy learning model
constructed around a potentially recursive cycle of 'stimulus', 'talk
about', 'shared task', 'student task', 'assessment point', 'assessment
criteria', and opportunities throughout for reflection when teacher and
students talk about the following questions:
1. Listen... what
do you hear?
Teaching and learning strategies
Mr Bolton has an urban composite year
five, six and seven class. Before the first lesson of the unit
begins he writes carefully on the whiteboard at the front of the
classroom a focus question to stimulate interest, asking the class
'What is the difference between 'HEARING' and 'LISTENING'?' He
hopes that his students will participate in discussion and activities,
exploring the differences between hearing and listening, and sound and
silence.
Mr Bolton directs the class to close their eyes for thirty seconds to
listen, in silence, to all of the sounds around them, both in the room
and, externally through doors, windows and walls, sounds outside the
room. He suggests they particularly listen for and list sounds of
which they are normally unaware in the classroom. At the end of
that time he asks, 'What did you hear?' Then, at his request, a
student lists, on the whiteboard, the sounds members of the class heard
over the thirty seconds.
Mr Bolton has asked the Hearing Impairment Specialist who visits
students at the school every week for malleable plastic ear
plugs. From this part of the unit onwards he invites individuals
within the class sto take turns of up to fifteen minutes duration, to
be 'hearing impaired' within the classroom. He forewarns
those members who volunteer that they may find this a frustrating
experience. However, at the same time, he reminds them that for
genuinely hearing impaired students this temporary discomfort is often
a permanent reality.
Mr Bolton now shares the twenty six members of his class between
six groups of four and five students. He distributes butchers
paper and textas between these groups and instruct students to sort the
whiteboard list of sounds into those which are natural and those which
are 'cultural' or made by people.
At the end of this particular exercise, as an assessment point
each group presents, through a nominated reporter, its re-organised
list of sounds. Mr Bolton also notes student participation as a
performance indicator
In ensuing discussion Mr Bolton encourages his students to talk about
why, normally, they are not aware of all of these sounds around them.
What happens that makes this possible? Mr Bolton explains that
our brains block out those sounds which we do not need to listen to,
asking, how would they function if they were? 'What, then', he
concludes with the question, 'is the difference between listening and
hearing?'
By way of a shared task Mr Bolton has a student draw up two columns on
the board, one for 'LISTENING' and one for 'HEARING'. The class
identifies and lists words and phrases which contrast the two words.
Now Mr Bolton displays his 'LISTEN' chart and after he and the class
have read through it aloud, turning it into a kind of game with
different groups taking a line, they talk about how this chart
describes the 'Listening' process. Mr Bolton asks 'Is it an accurate
description?'
Next Mr Bolton has his students move back into smaller groups and they
attempt to role-play the 'LISTEN' chart, with one person taking the
role of speaker. He or she talks about 'Hearing and Listening'
while the rest act out each direction.
LISTEN........
Look
Idle your motor
Sit up straight
Turn towards the speaker
Engage your brain
Note why you are listening
......with thanks to
Jeannie Bauwens
As an arts related task students design their own wall posters using
the words of the 'LISTEN' chart. An assessment point is provided
as student posters are displayed within the classroom and elsewhere in
the school. The impact of these wall posters provides a
performance indicator for Mr Bolton's assessment notes.
Using an audio-tape and cassette recorder a group of students records a
'silent period of time of two minutes' in the classroom. This
requires the rest of the class to be absolutely quite for that time.
Following this the group plays the tape back to the class in an
equivalent silence. Then the class talks about 'How silent
was our 'silence'. 'What should a silence 'sound' like?' 'Of what
use is silence?' As Mr Bolton intends developing this theme in
the following lesson, he is happy for the discussion to be superficial.
However he does insist they each write a sentence in their journals
describing what they thought 'silence' meant.
As they reflect on the lesson Mr Bolton and his students respond to the
following questions. When is it important to listen? Is our
classroom ever silent? What do we mean by silence? For
example, when Mr Bolton asks the class to be silent - is it then truly
silent? Then, for those students who experienced being 'hearing
impaired' he asks 'How did it feel to be deaf?'
Evaluation
As the lesson concludes Mr Bolton
asks himself:
Did the students generally enjoy the unit? Did they achieve the
learning outcomes? Were the activities appropriate to this particular
group? Do I need to incorporate more language activities to help
students understand and talk about what they are doing?
Then as part of his own forward planning he asks, 'Where do I go
from here? Continue with the next unit in this teaching/learning
sequence, ie 'Sound Around Us'. How do I build on to what they have
learned here? Support and confirm the listening outcomes of this unit
elsewhere in class work. Listening is critical to all
teaching/learning settings.
2. Sounds Around Us
A brief description of the Lesson
In this lesson Mr Bolton and his
students will focus their teaching and learning on gaining an increased
awareness of the sounds in their own external school environment. To
facilitate this they will share activities such as walking together
around the school grounds, listening to the sounds which occur there,
recording these aurally or in writing and, through follow up discussion
and tasks, making decisions about what they believe sound and silence
are.
In this lesson Mr Bolton introduces concepts related to random
environmental sound and silence and has the class survey ways of
recording and re-presenting them away from the soundscapes in which
they naturally occur. He also encourages students to distinguish
between hearing and listening, random and deliberate sound, natural and
'cultural' sound. The integralness of sound with silence is also
introduced.
For this lesson Mr Brown's focus question, which he writes on the
whiteboard, is 'What is sound?'
Once they have settled Mr Bolton explains that he wants them to focus
on sounds within their own school. He has already explained to
the principal that his class will be 'touring'. Now he takes the
class on a sound data collection exploration of the school buildings
and grounds.
A couple of students have charge of tape recorders to tape sounds and
'sound-scapes'.
However he encourages his students to rely more on their aural memories
to recollect what they hear and where they have heard it, supported
by notes in their journals where he suggests they list the sounds
they hear and note their context. So, as his students 'travel'
with him - and prompted by Mr Bolton - they list sounds they hear and
also contrasting soundscapes such as those where there is an echo and
those which seem 'dead'.
As they walk with Mr Bolton he encourages the class to talk about which
sounds they hear, where they hear these sounds, who or what is making
them, including whether they are natural or made, in some way, by
people, which sounds are deliberate or organised, and which
sounds happen randomly. Mr Bolton also encourages students to
invent and ask their own questions.
Back in the classroom Mr Bolton has a student list the sounds
they heard on the board and note particularly interesting
'soundscapes'. They discuss what was heard and where, which
sounds they found most interesting, and why.
As a further shared task they firstly visually map the collecting
of the sounds graphically using symbols for sounds, and aurally 'walk'
the school through a 'sound' re-creation of the journey, in a sound
sequence using the visual map as a guide. At first they carry
this out collectively as a class, then in smaller groups with four or
five students to a group, recreating their own visual maps.
Mr Bolton's students enjoy the sound sequence they have re-created and
decide they would like to present it as a performance to another class.
As criteria for asessment Mr Bolton takes anecdotal note recording his
students' willingness to present their own work to an audience, their
accuracy in representing the mapped sounds visually, their accuracy in
representing the mapped sounds aurally.
In the process of reflection Mr Bolton and his students talk about the
following questions:
What is sound? What is silence? What do we usually mean by
'silence' (for example in a classroom - this is to encouraging an
understanding of the relativity of silence to sound. If you think
your students capable of understanding the concept, discuss 'absolute
silence'. Does it exist? What would it be like?) Can
sound and silence exist separately?
How much does where we hear sounds affect our hearing them?
(soundscapes, echo, etc)
Would other people be able to tell where we had been if they heard our
'sound sequence' of sounds in our school grounds? How could we
organise the sounds on our list? (eg random, cultural, environmental,
natural, noise)
Evaluation
Mr Bolton thinks about the following:
- Did his students generally enjoy
the unit?
- Did they achieve the learning
outcomes?
- Were the activities appropriate to
this particular group?
- Do I need to incorporate more
language activities to help students understand and talk about what
they are doing?
Forward Planning
Mr Bolton asks himself 'Where do I go
from here?'
He believes that either he and the class could proceed to the next
lesson prepared in this sequence or explore with the class, another
sound environment. He is aware that this supports a school
excursion in another subject area involving a visit to a reputedly
noisy factory. Although another teacher is conducting this Mr
Bolton will encourage his students, in their collection of data for
that subject, to also collect for further sound activities, in a way
similar to that of this lesson.
3. Working With
Sounds Creatively
Description of the lesson
In this unit Mr Bolton and his class
will examine the concept of 'same-different', a balance of which is
fundamental to the effectiveness of a work of art, through discussion
supported by examples, and by incorporating repetition and contrast in
an original sound sequence.
Work Requirements
Mr Bolton expects that his students
will undertake the following tasks
- listen to and then represent
sounds and their properties as graphic symbols
- represent other sounds and their
properties they know as graphic symbols
- arrange a sequence of sounds
employing repetitive and contrasting themes.
- map and graphically represent the
sound sequence using symbols to represent sounds.
- engage in discussion within the
class and smaller groups, and record in summary, as a paragraph journal
entry their understandings of the unit
Assessment
Assessment will be based on students'
active participation in the unit as an individual and in group
activities, graphic score of sound sequences, and their participation
in performance of sound sequences.
Teaching and learning strategies
For his focus question, written on
the whiteboard, Mr Bolton asks 'What is it that makes a work of art
seem complete and 'balanced'?'
He begins the lesson by asking his students to imagine a situation
which he describes to introduce the concept of 'same' or
repetition. He is aware that some of the students in the class
will understand what it is to live, up to the present time in their
lives, in the same house. He will call on their experience as one
response.
So he asks, 'How would it be if we spent the whole ninety years of our
lives living in the same house, sleeping in the same bed every night,
going to the same school, having the same teacher, then the same job
and so on?' Several students understand and respond by
suggesting it would become boring.
Now he encourages the class to talk about what happens when there seems
to be too much 'same' in an event to which there is much the same
response, that it would be boring. Then he asks what could be
done to change such a situation to have a satisfactory outcome.
Now Mr Bolton asks them to imagine another situation to introduce the
concept of 'different' or contrasted. He knows that some students
in the class have previously attended more than one school, a couple in
different towns. Again he calls on their experience as a response.
He asks 'How would it be if every single day we changed our home, the
town we lived in, the school we went to, the job we went to for our
whole ninety years of living?' This time several students suggest
it could become very confusing. A girl uses the word
'disorienting' and Mr Bolton congratulates her. A brief
discussion about the notion of 'eastern' or 'alien' diverts them.
Mr Bolton talks for a moment about the first use of 'orient' to
describe 'Arabia', as 'things and places in the east.'
He brings the discussion back by suggesting that this is appropriate as
people found 'places eastern' a somewhat frightening, confusing idea,
of difference. They talk about what happens when there seems to
be too much 'different' and what could be done satisfactorily to change
such a situation.
They continue, discussing 'same' and 'different' around them. Mr
Bolton asks 'What is the same about specified things, activities and
events such as the school year, or their classroom compared with the
one next door.
As a shared task they decide to 'map' the school year as a chart,
entering symbols to show whether a month is mostly holidays or mostly
school. They represent the holidays with somebody at play and
school by a figure crouched over a desk. Mr Bolton mentions that
these are what we call CONCRETE symbols because they represent real
things. He says his students might want to choose to use ABSTRACT
symbols, that either is acceptable.
For example your chart might look like this (where the circles
represent holidays and the triangles, school):
Tension
and Release
They talk about which squares look
similar and why, and which look different and why. They note how many
different patterns of squares there are and which one is repeated most
often.
Then Mr Bolton divides the class into
two groups. he makes group
one responsible for 'Holidays' and group two for
'School'. Each group goes into a quick 'huddle' and chooses a
sound, or sounds, to represent the holiday feeling. Mr Bolton
shows a student how to 'conduct' the mapped chart by moving with a
pointer from left to right across it. He tells the 'conductor
that how fast or slow the Sound Sequence moves is over to whoever
leads. The class likes the way the sequence sounds and decides it
will rehearse and perform this 'Sound Sequence' later.
Now in small groups, using butchers paper and textas, the students draw
blank twelve square time charts similar to the one above. Using
symbols to represent events, they map an activity they have enjoyed
recently. Some map a game and a dance, others a fishing
expedition and a bush walk. Each group finds a space to rehearse
their Sound Sequence in. Although this is difficult because Mr
Bolton is not prepared to let anybody go where he can't keep an eye on
them, by carefully using corners of the room and verandah space outside
he is able to allow most groups a satisfactory 'sound' space to
rehearse their sequence in.
A representative of each group explains their group's Graphically
Represented Sound Sequence to the remainder of the class followed by
the group performing. Mr Bolton asks the audience and each group
to think about how many events they needed to represent as
symbols, which events happened more than once, which event
happened most often, and which events happened only once in each
'piece'.
This class performance of each group's sound sequence provides Mr
Bolton with anecdotal information for assessment.
Assessment Criteria
Mr Bolton sees as assessment criteria
the students' willingness to present their own work to an audience and
student participation in the preparation and presentation of the work.
Mr Bolton and his students reflect on the lesson as they talk about the
following questions:
- 'Do you think your group's mapped
sequence of activities was effective - in other words did it 'work'?'
- 'If it was effective what made it
'work'?' 'Were the 'ingredients' in your sound sequence 'recipe'
balanced between 'same' and 'different'. 'How might we find the
right balance?'
- 'Or, if it didn't seem to be
effective why didn't it work?' 'Were 'same/different'
balanced?' 'What, if anything, could you do to improve it?'
In evaluating the effectiveness of
his lesson Mr Bolton asks himself the following questions;
- Did my students generally enjoy
the unit?
- Did they achieve the learning
outcomes?
- Were the activities appropriate to
this particular group?
- Do I need to incorporate more
language activities to help students understand and talk about what
they are doing?
Forward Planning
In asking where might
he go from here Mr Bolton decides this may be an opportunity to listen
to music which has a balance of 'same' and 'different'. He
recalls from his own school days, that the Twelve Bar Blues, based on a
pattern of 'same/different' Chord Sequences, is usually easy for
students to follow. He remembers too that any number of old rock
'n' roll numbers, particularly early Elvis Presley songs such as 'Hound
Dog', or 'Blue Seude Shoes' are based on this MUSICAL FORM.
He wonders, to himself, if it is stretching credibility to suggest a
correlation between the twelve bar blues as a balanced mixture of
'same-different' and a balanced diet of activites of the twelve months
of the year. Compare, for example, our mapping of the school year
with this graphic representation of the twelve bar blues, where the
changes are Chord changes.
Finally he asks himself, 'How do I build on to what they have learned
here?'
He looks for the 'same/different' theme in other arts and general
curriculum areas. As it is fundamental to our way of life it
should appear in all sorts of seemingly unlikely places.
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