Music

In term three, our focus for music will on the creating strand of the curriculum. Our students will be improvising, composing and arranging musical ideas. 

Our F1 students have been expanding their knowledge of solfa, keyboard note names, and fine-tuning their favourite activity—improvising on the keyboards! In the first week, we explored the pairs of black keys, and in the second week we moved on to the groups of three. Using an imaginary journey into outer space as our inspiration, each student contributed to a class soundscape, taking turns to add their own musical ideas. It is always such a pleasure to watch our young musicians make creative choices and bravely try new things. I wish you could have heard their music—it was beautiful!

Our Year 2/3/4 students are very excited to be learning the ukulele. At the moment we are working with just one chord, so our song choices are still fairly limited (although Row, Row, Row Your Boat has been getting a good workout!). As we learn more chords, our repertoire will continue to grow. In the meantime, we have been exploring the traditional Torres Strait Islander song Taba Naba. We imagined all the fun activities we might do at the reef—surfing, paddleboarding and canoeing—before hopping into our imaginary dinghies to sing Taba Naba while performing the traditional seated dance (after drying off, of course!).

Our Year 5/6 students will be exploring music creation using the free online program Chrome Music Lab. In the first week, we revised our understanding of timbre using the Spectrogram, which allowed us to see the sounds we could hear. In Week 2, we had a fantastic time creating and looping rhythms. We started with a simple rock beat before experimenting with different layers and patterns.