Broderick Lemke

October 30, 2016

EDUC 316
Authentic K-8 Composition Activities to Engage, Perform and Assess

Kenneth Liske, Nicole Petroff and Rebecca Rice presented a session on composition for

the younger ages, many of the activities from the session would apply great to the instrumental

classroom. The younger grades activities included using hand bells and manipulatives to

compose and were geared towards a younger elementary age group, but the other two activities

were incredibly useful.

Composition can be difficult for young students because starting with a blank page and

adding notes to it can be incredibly intimidating. Many young students dont know where to start

and it is essential to give them guidelines to compose within. An example of this would be

working with a beginning band program and having them compose only with the first three notes

and the note values that they have learned. In addition it is important to set students up for

success by limiting ways in which their creations could sound unfinished. Having rules for

students starting on the tonic and end on the tonic are great ways to make a piece sound like it

finishes at the end. Additionally you can provide some hints for them such as pointing out that

scale degree seven and five both like to go to scale degree one. It is best to start with a lot of

limitations and then over time remove them to allow students freedom. However, if students

want freedom initially and are comfortable exploring use your judgement if they are going down

a good path. Chances are in that case that they tried playing something and it sounds good to

them and it is important to treat their compositional thoughts as valid.

 One activity that starts off very simply with composition is having students start with just

using rhythm. You can have students get into teams and play a game of rhythm telephone with

them. One person writes down a rhythm in a meter of your choosing and then shows the next

person in their line. This is the student composing a rhythm and you can then check to make sure

that students are understanding note lengths and meters and use this as a composition

grade/artifact that demonstrates their knowledge. You then have the next person whisper the

rhythm (on counting or Kodaly rhythmic names) and that person writes it down. This continues

until the end of the line where you can compare what the last person has to what the first person

has. This game encourages them to work as a group and the students each get a turn at

composing and gets them dictating rhythm in a fun way.

For older students you can take a more theoretical approach to composition. The

presenter shared several theory worksheets that he passed out to his class when he taught middle

school. They began by teaching triads and how they were built, then having the students identify

the I, IV and V chords. The students then wrote the specified chords under a melody when

instructed and over the course of several worksheets figured out how to add harmony under a

melody, then how to write a melody over a chord progression. One of the final sheets had the

students writing their own chord progressions with a basic lesson in function of harmony and

their own melody. Although worksheets can be a bit boring, by taking it step by step each

student was writing their own music and they gained more theoretical tools to use in their

composition, going from a narrow amount of variables in their composition to more and more

freedom. He also discussed how students who play monophonic instruments could compose

music that was single line. This is a technique that is able to be approached without a complete

understanding of harmony. As before it would help to give guidelines to have students start and
end on the tonic and build from there with their freedoms. Both ways are wonderful and make

great artifacts as the teacher can pull them out as examples and play them for parents at

conferences to show the progress their student is making.