Rationale
Children love to sing. Attending music class gives students a variety of opportunities for self-expression. Students look forward to coming to a class where they can jump, hop, slide, stretch, and walk to the beat. With their bodies, they can demonstrate high and low, fast and slow, loud and soft. They enjoy singing, clapping, chanting, tapping, rapping, and humming. During this past school year, one student whose class came to music every Friday, would greet me on Monday mornings with, "I'll see you on Friday." Using the "chocolate" theme will enrich the desire for all of my fifth graders to come to music class.
Children in all corners of the world have sung songs, chanted rhymes, and played games for centuries. Such folklore is derived from diverse cultures and is usually transmitted from child to child and from generation to generation. For a number of reasons, music is an enriching experience. Children learn by singing songs, chanting rhymes, playing hand games and finger plays, and by playing with each other. For that reason, the YMCA-YWCA of Guelph (Canada) uses a curriculum entitled "Playing to Learn" that was developed by the YMCA of Greater Toronto. It is based on the fact that playing engages a child in a way that provides the foundation for language and literacy, science and technology, mathematics, and the arts. (2)
I am a composer, and throughout each school year I have continued to compose songs with lyrics that support specific subjects and content areas. In 1998, I composed a song
about the Jamestown colony that, according to one fourth grade teacher, helped her students learn and retain pertinent facts that were tested on the state History examination. I am a fervent believer in integrating music with various aspects of the curriculum. Children find joy, power, and a passionate sense of self in music. It is important to them and holds the capacity to serve a variety of purposes.
A first grade teacher at a school where I taught at the beginning of my career utilizes a song booklet of original songs every day as a means of fostering a greater interest in reading for beginners. She once told me that she believed that a student who can sing a song can read a song. We would often team-teach when she would ask for my assistance with teaching specific tunes and with aligning those tunes to her original history-related lyrics. I would sing the tune a cappella (without accompaniment) for the students and assist them in fitting the lyrics to the tune. My colleague is not alone in her approach to teaching reading. The notion of singing to expedite reading in young children is shared by many educators across the country.
My personal experience shows that when facts are written as lyrics to tunes, both traditional and original tunes, the facts are learned at a faster rate, and overall retention of the facts is better. I have assisted students in all subject areas during tutorial sessions and have witnessed those who are having trouble learning the subject matter. This experience jolted my memory of a typical choir class, where I give students a song, sometimes with extensive lyrics, and they are able to learn the song within the allotted forty-five-minute time frame. I then decided to write songs with specific facts taken from a variety of disciplines. Consequently, when I teach these same students in music class and take subject matter from mathematics (place values and skip counting), history (Jamestown), and science (the earth's rotation and revolution), and then compose songs with both original and traditional tunes based on that specific subject matter, the students are able to learn one song per forty-five-minute class session; learning the song is synonymous with learning the lyrics, and the lyrics are merely the specific facts creatively written.
Music is also used as a motivator for learning. In 1994, I composed a song entitled "Wintertime" for my elementary school choir to sing for our district's City Hall music series. I still teach this song and often have my choir sing it at Winter Holiday programs. The song consists of vivid descriptions of winter scenery, adjectives to describe wintry conditions, metaphors about coming in from the cold, and messages that nurture self-esteem. Because of singing this song in choir class, a third grader, who was assigned to make a seasonal diorama for her science class, chose the winter season because she had experienced a positive feeling from singing the song as a member of the choir. The song made her feel good, and hence, she wanted her diorama to reflect the positive feeling that the song conveyed for her.
I am aiming to teach the unit on "Bate, Bate Chocolate" in a way that will inspire my fifth grade students to have a positive feeling about writing. Most students view writing assignments as either boring or too difficult. In executing my unit, I will create excitement and enthusiasm by delivering the information in ways that will foster more positive feelings. The song has already traveled with its carriers from Mexico into the United States. This fact is evident in an observation that I made this school year in a third grade class in which I taught the chant version of the song. In this class, two students knew the chant and informed me that they frequently performed "Bate, Bate Chocolate" with an accompanying hand game. More than likely, others have either participated in this hand game or have witnessed it on the playground. I have invited these students to come to the fifth grade classes during the first week of my unit and demonstrate the hand game with which they are familiar.
I teach in each classroom teacher's homeroom. I use a cart on which I house my music textbooks, instruments, music terminology charts, and CD player. There are advantages to teaching from a cart. The students are already seated at their desks when I arrive. I also have access to the classroom overhead projector, student dictionary sets, and blackboard space. Similarly, the students have access to their personal school supplies. I see each class once a week for forty-five minutes. Because the fifth graders in my district are administered the state writing test during the middle of the second semester, I intend to teach my unit at the beginning of the second semester. This is a time during which fifth grade classroom teachers are teaching their students a variety of writing strategies and giving them a series of prompts on which to practice their writing skills. My goal has always been to work with the classroom teachers. Consequently, I will be executing my unit during the same time period. This goal was the motivational force that encouraged me to incorporate writing with music.
I recognize the need for my fifth grade students to be able to grasp a greater appreciation for and knowledge of Latino cultures as they begin to become more aware of the culturally rich presence of this, now the largest, minority group in the United States. The growing Latino population is prevalent in every segment of society, yet school students who are not of Latino descent know very little about the history and culture of the people. My unit is designed to teach students about Latino cultures, specifically the culture of the Mexican community, by teaching them from the perspectives of writing, history, and music.
One way to learn about a particular ethnic group's culture is to learn about its music and its food. The renowned gastronome, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, once stated, "Tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you who you are." (3) Food in general is a form of cultural symbolism. Each culture is known for certain foods that make up its general cuisine. Mexico is easily defined by its regional foods as well as its indigenous music. The Mexican song "Bate, Bate Chocolate" offers me the chance to tell students that chocolate is a key ingredient in Mexican cuisine and was a pre-Hispanic commodity that continued to thrive in different ways in New Spain (the colonial Spanish name for Mexico).(4) My students will learn about music, history, culture, and cuisine and will be inspired to write three short assignments from teacher-created writing prompts. Each prompt will be based on the chocolate theme.
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