PART 3 - Adaptive Music Class 101: Content

In this latest edition of Adaptive Music Class 101 we look at content, or WHAT to teach. Picking music and activities might seem challenging for a situation like this, but these tips should help you better pick and craft your lessons and activities for your students.

Content

One discussion that comes up often with teaching adaptive classes is, “What kind of content or music should I be teaching?” Teachers sometimes feel they either have to find all new musical material or that they need to just use simple nursery rhymes and preschool songs. The content and music you love to teach doesn’t need to change, but your approach and expectations of how the students will engage and participate in active music making with it might. One place to start is designing experiences with your content that use various modalities. The more ways a student can engage with the music, the more chances you have for that student to both understand and demonstrate their understanding. Some examples include adding movements and physicality to the music or using movement props such as scarves. Providing tactile experiences that offer a chance for the students to touch and feel the music (ex: using pipe cleaners to show the melody, tapping a beat chart, or placing felt notes on a felt staff). The modality that I always make sure to include in my lessons is visual. Having a visual representation of the song, activity, or concept you’re teaching (whether it’s the words to the song or images representing their meaning) creates a concrete idea that can stay present with the student and can be continuously referenced. As one of my mentors told me, “Auditory information is temporary, visual information is permanent.” Other ideas for adapting your own content include reducing the amount the student is responsible for (ex: sing only the repeated part), removing the words from a song and singing it on a neutral syllable, or adding ostinato parts that students can perform while they experience the song multiple times.

Another powerful way to find engaging content for your students is to choose things based off of their interests. Some students might have specific songs that they like that you could adapt for your class. Other students might have interests in things like trains, animals, or other areas that you could be used as a basis for selecting songs. In one of our 5th grade classes we used the theme song to the cartoon Invader Zim (a favorite of one of our students) to create a drumming piece that helped us learn the Ti-Tika rhythm. Not only was this a fun and motivating activity for all the students, but it provided us an opportunity to work on grade-level appropriate musical concepts that might have been less accessible (or interesting) otherwise.

Once the content is chosen, we need to look at how to break it down and teach it. Part 4 of our series talks about using Task Analysis to effectively deliver instruction in developmentally appropriate lessons.