Day 2 in the class room. Today's focus was helping the kids make inferences- which is a 5th grade language arts standard. I knew that as the students improved their capability to infer, they would improve as readers, being able to make educated guesses about the characters and themes. To teach this concept, I used a lesson plan given to me by a friend. The idea was to help students make inferences about the characters in the story based on what they heard in the music and what they saw in the movie.
We watched a clip from Peter and the Wolf. As you probably know from your childhood music class, this movie is a score with narration on top. In the music, an instrument represents each character. GOLDEN for the concept of inferencing. You see, as children hear a specific instrument with a certain tempo and timbre, they begin making assumptions. After hearing a high, fast and happy flute solo for the bird, I asked them to tell me about the character of the bird.
"Fast!" "Happy!" "Silly!" "Carefree!" I was amazed at how quickly they came up with these inferences. We continued to do this for each character. Here is the table we came up with:
We talked about aspects of the music that caused them to infer the emotions and traits that they did. They identified that the instruments, melody and tempo made the biggest difference.
I loved our class discussion that followed about making inferences. We talked about how in books as well we can make educated guesses based on the clues that we are given from the author. It has been so amazing seeing all the overlaps with 5th grade curriculum and music!