The Piano Key Problem

I was watching a program about how a piano works earlier with my daughter. One of the facts was about the number of white and black keys. Wonder if children can use their reasoning skills (drawing a picture, making a model or looking for a pattern) to solve this:

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On an 88 key piano, there are 52 white keys. How many are black? 

The lowest key (first note) is an A. The last note is C.How many A, B, C, D, E, F & G notes are there?

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A copy of this can be found here.

Here's the answer with a picture from Piano-Keyboard-Guide.com:

'We Make Use of...' Charanga

For over a year now, we have used the Charanga website to aid our delivery of the music curriculum across the school. The scheme is used by adults who are 'not musical', those who have a decent subject knowledge and those who play instruments and are very knowledgable and confident in this subject area. All find it a useful resource (in different ways).

First of all, it's more than just a scheme. There's loads more too!

The scheme is useful and split into six units of work per year group (one per half term). Of course, in school you could juggle some of these around, but there is progression built in. The units come with lessons planned and resourced, but the teacher still needs to teach with them and possibly even adapt the lesson and resources for their class. Each unit is based upon a song or composition and builds up an understanding of it and the way it has been produced. The image above shows units for the autumn term for Year Four and Five. There's sheet music, backing tracks, interactive videos...

 

In addition, there is:

Music World is a Charanga programme especially for children to use themselves. It’s a safe online space where children can learn more about music and practise their instrument if they are learning to pla.

Song Centre is 100s of songs to enjoy with your pupils + singing courses for younger children.

 

Freestyle Resource Centre is a bank of songs to be used as you wish. 

There's planning to support SEND pupils too and an assessment tool.If you're interested in it, sign up for a free trial and give it a go...

Charanga is provided to our school through our LA. We have not been asked to write this post or received anything for it. This is, as always, the view and opinion of two full-time class teachers about something we use in the classroom. We hope it is useful for others to read. 

10 Pieces

We recently have been making use of the brilliant 10 pieces DVD from the BBC. This film consists, not surprisingly, of ten classical pieces of music ranging from Holst’s 'Mars' to Stravinksy’s 'Firebird'.

Each section is introduced by a familiar BBC face who explains some key information about each piece.

Image credit: ichef.bbci.co.uk

In class, we have looked at the first few pieces and used them as a stimulus for a variety of creative activities from writing poetry about Mars to drawing the Mountain King's Hall. A recent lesson made use of Britten’s ‘Storm’. After watching the section through a couple of times, we had a brief discussion in class about the children’s reactions. This was done in small groups leading onto a wider class discussion. The pupils were able to have discussions about both the music and the video and were able to use the discussion as a starting point for their creative work.

After the discussion, the children were given the opportunity to create a piece of art to present their feelings. Different media were offered for use as well as providing different size sheets of paper.

The majority of the children chose to use paint to represent their feelings and created pictures either inspired by the video itself or the discussion within the classroom (the eye of the storm).

We then took photos of the pictures and created a movie of the art using Windows Moviemaker. Initially we found a Creative Commons licensed version of the music to play over the top of the pictures and, after properly attributing it, created a piece that could be shared with all parents. To do this, the movie was embedded with one of the original pictures using Aurasma. Subsequently, we found that the BBC make their music accessible from the 10 Pieces website.

Scan this picture with the Aurasma app after signing up to the 6DA channel

As well as being an excellent introduction to a range of musical pieces and orchestral work, the DVD provides a wonderful stimulus for creativity within the classroom especially for those in need of a short one-off lesson as we near the end of the year. 

Update:
A request was made for more detail about how we achieved the presentation of the work. The movie itself was very simply created by importing the photos into Moviemaker, adding a fade to block transition and then placing titles and credits before and after the movie (also easy to achieve in iMovie). To find the music we used a creative commons search engine (http://search.creativecommons.org/) making sure to identify how to attribute the music.

Aurasma is a wonderfully simple app to use, which allows you to link a variety of media to images. We have used it to share work (as above), create a welcome message for the class, share a message in a time capsule and share messages from the teacher. For more information see this blog entry.