Music 

Music News

Remote Learning is, for all involved, a challenging experience, and for Music at Brookside, it’s been no exception. A program that is normally based on hands on, collaborative experiences has had to adapt to an online, isolated approach. We’ve tried to create engaging, interactive, and challenging lessons for our students, and would like to thank parents and students for the incredible efforts you’ve put in to engaging with the lessons, making and uploading videos, sorting out issues with logins, downloads, device compatibility and all of the difficulties that threaten to stop us from achieving our goal- to have our students enjoying themselves, being creative, feeling empowered and learning about music. 

Year 3 and 4

In Term 3 in Music the grade 3/4s have been exploring the musical elements of pitch, melody, timbre and rhythm through singing and experimenting with their voices. They have learned 3 songs that will be used when they come back to classroom learning in games and activities that will help to further develop and consolidate their understanding of these musical elements. This is part of a broader shift towards embedding a culture of singing in the music program in the early years at Brookside College. Hopefully, we’ll soon be able to indulge in the joys of singing together and share it with the school community. 

Year 5

Our Year 5’s this term have been investigating the connections between music, sound and science. They’ve been creating their own instruments at home using a variety of different materials, and by doing so been contemplating some of the ways sound can be produced, how it can be amplified and modified, what causes sound to be of a given pitch or timbre, what soundwaves are and how they change with pitch and volume, and been encouraged to explore the difference between noise and music, a most subjective endeavour!

We’ve received many creative submissions- below are a selection of some of the work submitted by students, and a from one on her experience of the music program.  

In year 5 we have been learning about Junk orchestra. We have made multiple instruments using household objects such as straws and balloons. Using the instruments, we had made we had to decide if it was single reed, double reed, or no reed. We had to play the instruments multiple times sending in videos of us making a piece of music using an instrument we made of our choice.

We have been learning about soundwaves and how they travel which has helped us identify the way our instruments make sound and what we can do to make different sounds. We have explored lots of different ways of making sounds and how they work on Chrome Music Lab.

Our music teachers have tried very hard to make learning music in remote learning possible, which I expect has been very hard because not all students have musical instruments, so making our own instruments has been a great experience to have. So, a big thankyou to all the music teachers trying their best to make learning music remotely, possible.

Ashlee 5E

Year 6 

In term 3 in Music the Grade 6’s have investigated music’s role in advertising , where they have explored the different ways music is used to help the selling of products and services. They have composed their own jingles for an advertisement, and explained how their jingle aided the advertisement to target a particular demographic. Throughout this unit students developed skills of critical consciousness, as well as skills using and manipulating various musical elements ,and compositional skills. There a quite a few budding advertising executives in the cohort! 

Year 7 

Our Year 7 students had the unenviable task of starting music for the first time in 2020 from their homes. An entire term has passed with them never meeting their teacher or having the chance to make music together in the classroom with all of the great instruments we normally have access too. Instead, they’ve been exploring music production using an online DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), called BandLab. As teachers, we have been truly amazed by student’s willingness to invest in the lessons, work at overcoming the hurdles of learning a brand new technology with the ever-present IT problems, and produce some truly fantastic music. We’re ever hopeful we can return to in person music making early in Term 4, but, should that prove impossible, we’re confident students have the skills necessary to continue their learning which, in Term 4, will focus on music styles from various cultural traditions around the world. 

Music has been fun this term, although it is very different than being in class. We are still learning about music, it has been a bit hard to find our way around the app but thanks to our amazing teachers they have made it a whole lot easier. The zooms have also helped a lot. We have made a whole bunch of cool Creations like, a bad guy remix, we learnt about Pitch, Scales, and Loops, Bass and Form, Chord Progressions, and lots more. 

Chelsea 7D

Thanks

The Music Team