Experiences and Outcomes:
I can sing and play music from a range of styles and cultures, showing skill and using performance directions, and/or musical notation. EXA 2-16a
I can use my voice, musical instruments and music technology to experiment with sounds, pitch, melody, rhythm, timbre and dynamics. EXA 2-17a
Inspired by a range of stimuli and working on my own and/or with others, I can express and communicate my ideas, thoughts and feelings through musical activities. EXA 2-18a
Lesson Outcomes
After this lesson, pupils will be able to:
- Listen and reflect on a piece of orchestral music
- Create their own Latin inspired rhythmic ostinatos
- Learn rhythms from Bernstein’s ‘Mambo’ and structure them into a piece
- Perform as an ensemble
- Learn musical language appropriate to the task
Curriculum Checklist
Learners will:
- Play and perform in ensemble contexts, using voices and playing musical instruments
- Improvise and compose music for a range of purposes using the interrelated dimensions of music
- Listen with attention to detail and recall sounds with increasing aural memory
Activities
Warm up. Start with your class stood in a circle again. This time after passing a clap around ask the children to suggest other body percussion or vocal sounds to pass along.
Remind them about the work you did with Mambo and tell them that you are going to spend a few lessons creating your own version of Bernstein’s piece. The first and most important element in any mambo is the pulse.
Demonstrate a pulse. Staying in your circle but perhaps sitting down, clap a slow, steady pulse and encourage your class to join in. If children are clapping at a different pace to you or speeding up encourage them to watch you as well as listen and try to stick together
It will help in later lessons if this initial pulse is quite slow. Slow pulses are difficult to perform by a group and will speed up. To prevent this, ask your children to think of a short word between each clap (for example their first name). Filling up the gap between claps can help to steady it.
- Explain that, unusually, the second beat is louder and stronger than the first.
- Saying ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ as you clap will help to reinforce this idea.
Body percussion: With your class standing encourage them to tap and stamp this slow pulse, tapping on the weak beat and stamping on the strong. (This will feel weird – it’s the opposite way around to what we expect!)
Instruments: Ask the class to choose two sounds, one ‘weak’ and one ‘strong’ to play these beats (a shaker and a drum would be ideal).
Split into groups and ask each team to practice the ‘weak-strong’ pulse either on body percussion or on instruments (you can use any unpitched instruments for this, save xylophones, glocks etc for another session). Challenge them to practice starting and stopping together neatly perhaps by appointing a conductor
FINALLY end the session by hearing all the groups and, if time permits, putting together one big mambo pulse piece.
Additional resources and a more detailed lesson plan can be found here on the BBC Ten Pieces website;
