Musical Mapping

             This week's lesson was so fun! We got to explore musical mapping. The lesson started off by having us watch the Mountain King Line Rider video. Here's the link to the video if you've never seen it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIz3klPET3o it's super satisfying to watch so I highly recommend it! The kids loved it and kept asking if we could watch more.

             After the Mountain King video, I pulled up the screen to show the students the map I made of the Delibes Coppelia Waltz: 

First, I had them listen to the piece while I traced along with what I had drawn. Then, I had them trace along with me with their fingers in the air. After they had experienced many repetitions of the piece with the tracings, they traced them on their own.

I then played a short clip from The Dance of The Sugar Plum Fairy. We listened to it once, practiced tracing in the air a couple of times, then they used their whiteboards to trace their own map of the piece:

After tracing along with their own map, they were instructed to switch with a partner. That's when they realized following someone else's map with no direction was extremely difficult! They liked it much more when they got to work together with their partner, following along so that their partner could show them what they were imaging when they had made their map. 

The final step in this lesson plan was to have them map Shakira's song "Try Everything". I didn't tell them what the song would be, I just told them they would be making one more map. As soon as the music came on they all sort of froze. "Huh?! This song has words!" it was a definitely a fun way of showing them that mapping can be applicable to all music, not just the instrumental music. I saw many students really tune into the beat of the piece as they were tracing that one, which was really exciting! It's always fun to see principles from previous lessons being used.

This was such a fun class period! The white boards were a really helpful way to let me see where each individual student was in their understanding of the lesson, and helped the students easily fix any mistakes they may have made. If I were to change anything about this lesson plan, I probably would have given them more repetitions of listening to the song before having them draw so they felt more familiar with what they were trying to map out. Overall, I felt like this was an effective lesson at helping the students listen to the music in a new way!