Student Vignettes
KAROLINA
Karolina was a bright, talkative student with a natural affinity for music. Particularly, she loved to sing and soaked up new songs like a sponge. I would often hear from her mother how Karolina sang songs she learned in school all evening long.
Goals
Karolina was always looking for new challenges. She also has perfectionist tendancies and sometimes fixated on getting things "right." Based on these observations, some goals were:
- Open creative spaces for Karolina so that she would embrace unpolished and "grey" outcomes and processes (no "right" or "wrong")
- Foster Karolina's singing voice and natural pitch accuracy
- Teach Karolina new musical skills such as more advanced ukulele playing
EVIDENCE
Goals | Fostering Karolina's singing voice and challenging her musically: I worked frequently (weekly or biweekly) with Karolina using the ukulele as a vehicle for music learning and songwriting. Ukulele-learning is done during enrichment time, which is optional for the students. However, Karolina always chose to come to music during her center or gym time when given the option.
Elements to note in this video:
- Students learned the C-chord for the first time the previous week and are now exploring applying it to songs.
- Karolina (right) is actively holding the C-chord while strumming to a steady beat.
- The middle student is loosely holding the chord and the left student is not holding the chord at all.
- Students are singing "Taxi Taxi" with Karolina's voice leading. Karolina's pitch is slightly off here, likely due to both starting too low, and not having a strong instrumental lead from a teacher or external audio.
- This is also during the beginning of the year, where Karolina's sense of pitch was less developed. Karolina grew into her voice throughout the year.
Goals | Fostering Karolina's singing voice PT 2: The primary method with which my pre-kers develop their singing voices is through echoing and imitation. As students become more confident in their singing voices through practice, they begin to imitate my pitch and timbre through echo songs. Unfortunately, due to COVID, we had to move online, but I found creative ways to help students practice their pitch and echo such as the "Sol-Mi Challenge."
The Sol-Mi Challenge is a series of videos I created to gamify simple echoing. According to her mother, Karolina took extremely well to this challenge.
Note that in the first video, Karolina struggles a bit to match pitch. In the second video, her pitch is much more confident.
Goals | Opening creative spaces for Karolina: I find, especially in my private lesson students, that extremely bright students can sometimes have difficulty with creativity and open-ended projects. Karolina demonstrated perfectionist tendancies, always wanting to get things exactly "right." To provide a counter-narrative, I gave Karolina a lot of opportunities to practice creativity and songwriting throughout the year.
Here, Karolina is participating in a creative songwriting activity using Chrome Music Lab. She created the music through drawing, then improvised on top of it to create her own song.
Note that she has a natural way of working in rhyming words and her improvised melody stays around the tonic, or the most stable note, of the instrumental.
