by Whitney Dorman, TK Music Teacher and Murray Kotke, TK Grade 3 Teacher -

The Co-Curricular Activities (CCA) programme is a new initiative at CIS this year. The aim is to provide students with opportunities to explore four different focus areas: sports, arts, speech arts and STEAM. Each student spends 3 periods per week for 6 weeks in one focus area before rotating on to the next subject.

During the second CCA block, Grade 3 and 4 students explored the arts, and teachers and specialists teamed up to offer several different arts-related programmes. Students were able to choose which programme they wanted to participate in from a wide variety of focus areas including visual arts, crafts, music and dance...

One of the programmes offered was the Percussion CCA. The goal of this CCA was to teach students how different parts of an ensemble come together to create a piece that is larger than any one part. Even the seemingly smallest parts have an important role in the larger production.

The ability to keep a steady beat and play in time with others is the foundation of ensemble playing. Therefore, our first step was to work on keeping a beat and staying in tempo. We invited students to clap the beat while listening to a metronome. Then, after turning off the metronome, we asked them to keep going on their own. The natural tendency is to speed up. We then asked students to subdivide the beat either aloud or in their heads by counting “1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and,” etc... This helped the students to keep time and stay together.

The next step was to allow students to explore how the different rhythmic parts fit together to create a whole. Students worked together with partners to create a short rhythmic ostinato (repeating pattern). After listening to a teacher-created model, we invited students to comment on what they noticed. One observed that there were “holes” in each person’s rhythmic pattern. These “holes” were filled in by the other person. So, both people were not always playing all the time, and rather, took turns. There was an exchange of sound, very much like a conversation.

With these foundational skills in place, the next step was to begin learning the xylophone piece. The piece of music was modeled after the music of the gamelan (xylophone and gong ensembles) commonly found in Bali and throughout Indonesia. This style of music is based on ostinati (repeating patterns), which are layered together to create a musical whole. We showed the students a short video of a gamelan ensemble playing, and invited them to comment on what they noticed. Students commented that the musicians were “staying on beat,” “listening to each other,” and “working together as a team.”

The task of learning the piece itself took several weeks. We broke the piece into different parts, and each part into smaller chunks, focusing on a different section during each class period.

All the students had the opportunity to take turns trying all the parts. About two weeks before the final performance, we assigned each student a part based on their strengths and interests. The last two weeks were spent working on final touches: such as how to start together, layer in each part, watch the conductor for cues, and stop on time together.

During the last week of CCAs, the Grade 3 and 4 students gathered in the gym to share what they had learnt. The percussion CCA students performed their piece for their teachers and peers.

The outcomes of the percussion CCA were that students improved their ability to keep a beat, play in time, listen, and work together. Students also gained a better understanding of how different instrumental parts combine together to create a larger whole, and that each part, no matter how small, is vitally important to the sound of the entire group.