Haikus and Making Music
- Joanna Wright
- Oct 21, 2016
- 2 min read
When asked to go outside and take five pictures of things which catch your attention: I was a little taken aback! not just any kind of picture, however, but ones of close up objects or plants which made you think about things in life which often go unnoticed. Therefore, as seen in the images above, I took a picture of a flower, grass, a tree, a weird plant and of the cracks in between the paving stones.
The purpose of this opening task was to eventually write a haiku poem to express what we had come across outside, and to then use the words and descriptions in our poems to decide what kind of song to make up in which it would fit. For example: the poem we chose was about leaves falling off a tree, so having descending scales meant that this reflected the falling leaves. similarly, the last line was "naked, naked trees", and so the music ended for this line to emphasise the bare branches on the tree.
This would be excellent in the classroom as children could do a piece of English writing poetry or just a simple paragraph and then later they could make a simple piece of music from it. It encourages them to be more creative in a different way to maths and English by using different skills and thus developing new skills and possibly talents.
My poem: 'Unnoticed.'
The small things in life,
Delicate leaves on a tree
Always unnoticed.
A problem that our group came across was that because we heard different parts of another group's song- we found that we couldn't concentrate on making our own song so a solution was to move everything and actually find a more quiet space to work. this could also reflect other children's work in the classroom and in other subjects: if they have distractions around them it stifles creativity and brain activity and so sometimes it is best to have different room (if possible) when working with musical instruments to achieve the best results from the children.
I would definitely like to use this kind of a lesson in future as it gives children a chance to be let free in their imagination and it makes for a brilliant variation among all of the children because there will be so many different objects or topics that they will choose to write about. the very fundamental part of this lesson of looking at life through a magnifying glass changed my perspective on simple things like what i look out for when walking down the street.
See and appreciate the small things in life... Then make music out of them!
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