South-Central Canada is BEAUTIFUL in the fall! The weather isn’t too hot but we don’t have snow yet. All of the leaves change colors, harvest is coming to an end and families are sharing their baking. The students can go outside and come back in with minimal to no puddle jumping. A Canadian Fall is an absolute gold mine for music teachers. Use Onomatopoeia in the Fall We begin our autumn season talking about onomatopoeia. This is where we get the biggest dose of our Canadian outdoor fall sounds. Most classes are talking about this concept in the English and poetry/story-writing curriculums. This is an excellent opportunity for cross-curricular learning! We discuss some words that are sound and then we go on a scavenger hunt! (Scavenger hunt resource here.) We have a large open field, play structure, swings, sand pits, basketball court, etc. Lots of places to find sounds. When we go outside, the students have to find certain sounds (clank of a stick on the slide, for example). They LOVE this activity. They either work in partners or individually. Each student has a clipboard with a checklist of sounds that they have to run around with. At the conclusion of this activity, we play musical-floor-is-lava. More on that HERE. Found Sound After we discuss onomatopoeia, we slide into found sounds. Once again, we head back out with a mission. Each student/pairing has a specific rhythm that they have to create a song around. The catch is that they can only use items they find outside. Then we either record them outside and watch them on the screen, or we have a sharing circle and make a giant song out of it. This is fun with older students. They can discuss form and make creative decisions from there. STOMP is an excellent and memorable supplement for this lesson. Foley After spending several classes exploring sounds, we are introduced to foley! Foley is the reproduction of sounds within media to enhance the audio quality. There are several angles to approach this. Silent Movies Think about Charlie Chaplin (there is space for a whole history unit on silent films and bands inside the theater!) and the kind of sounds the audience expects to hear. A door slamming shut, a car driving by, many other things. This is where I bring in our auxiliary percussion petting zoo. The students only get to see the footage without any audio. They have a few minutes to look through the instruments and then decide which instruments would be appropriate. We reconvene and have a conversation about their intent, the rhythm they might use, etc. Then we playback the footage and the students play along with the story. Foley Artist Marco Costanzo Costanzo is a foley artist at Disney. He has worked on all sorts of movies such as “Ice Age” and “Marley and Me.” This YouTube Clip demonstrates his process of creating sounds post-production. He walks through several clips and shows different items that he used in the film “Marley and Me.” The interviewer then asks him to create sound for a silent clip of a tiger cub. The students then have to recreate sounds for the same clip without using instruments. *I find this video to also be a good conversation starter for jobs with music, uses for music, etc. This is definitely one of my favorite times of the year! Canadian outdoor fall sounds allows us to see music and sound past the classroom walls and encourages creative thinking using a piece of pop culture. So cool. Here is another silent video that my students love! Let me know how your students like it.
