“Following the yellow brick road” consisted in a six-hour musical educational path with inclusive features. It was conducted in a lower secondary school and addressed to a first-year class, where there was a student on the spectrum and with a mild cognitive impairment. The student showed preference for music and a remarkable talent in drawing.
The aim of the path was to dramatize in music the initial part of the book “The Wizard of Oz” by F. L. Baum. In order to achieve said aim, a series of musical ludic activities were conducted with an educational methodology mainly based on laboratories. The path was concluded with a final performance whose function was to allow for the assessment of what the students had learned.
The class showed great interest towards the activities proposed, including the disabled student who participated actively, with individual contributions, even reducing verbal stereotypes while working all together.
With regard to the music production activities, in the realization of the polyrhythm, the students used tin cans and mallets, and simple rhythmic instruments, such as claves and maracas. During the exploration stage, other sonorous objects can be used with the aim to arouse the students’ curiosity towards the expressive possibilities of their more or less everyday environments (for example, mallets made of straw beaten together to represent the steps of the Scarecrow). We used two big tin drums, recovered from enormous liquid containers used in the local leather tanning industry.
In order to realize the video-score, we used a computer, a scanner and an IWB. In the final music machine activity, I played the djembe, but any rhythmical music can be used.
The skills, goals and training objectives selected by the teacher for this experience are shown below.
With regard to the objectives related to music, by the end of the third year of the lower secondary school, the students had learned to:
- perform vocal and instrumental pieces of different genres and styles in an expressive way, collectively and individually, using even electronic instruments.
- improvise, reformulate, compose vocal and instrumental pieces, using both open structures and simple rhythmic-melodic schemes.
- connect key competences: communication in one’s mother tongue, digital abilities, interpersonal and civic competences, cultural sensitivity and artistic expression
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