Musical Themes
Teacher: Laura D'Angelo, Sam
Olivier
School: The Harley School
Hardware and Software: Internet
connection, HyperStudio
Grade: Seventh Grade
The goal of the lesson plan is for students to learn about
contemporary musical themes. The students are asked to find recordings,
learn about a contemporary music theme, and to present this information
to the class as a radio show. Sample topics:
"Rock in the 60's"
"Broadway Musicals in the 90's".
Groups of the three to four students research a chosen
topic, prepare a radio script giving important facts, include musical excerpts
illustrating the unique aspects of the piece(s), write and structure a
radio script as the presentation method, and perform the radio show to
the class.
Through this lesson plan, the students and teachers become
involved in using research tools on the Internet. They learn to become
efficient users of the search engines on the www in order to retrieve the
facts they need to product the radio show. They also use the computer to
prepare the scripts.
Before the use of computers the subject matter for the
lesson plan was limited. Only contemporary composers with large holdings
in music libraries were available for research. This greatly limited the
topics available. The more modern and pop culture musicians were not available.
With the Internet as a resource, the students have many
more musical groups and composers to choose from. They are using music
which is more real to their daily lives and this gives them greater enthusiasm
for the project. The beauty of this project is that adaption to the new
technology is easy. Old lesson plans needed little altering to include
the latest musical movements. But student enthusiasm is tripled. Our next
step is to include a HyperStudio presentation piece as the final product.
Lesson Plan Disclaimer
