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Kathleen P., California

I personally have experienced the power of a casual question, like “Did you write any music this week?” Last week one of my students casually asked me, “Are we going to have any songs for Halloween?” When I started looking for songs, I didn’t come up with much, so I got busy this past weekend composing, changing lyrics and having lots of fun. I have come up with 4 songs, three using Simply Music Level 1 songs and another song from Level 3. Hope you have as much fun with them as I did and plan on having with my students this month.

Laura L., California

I want to share with you that though I have always dabbled in having my students write lyrics, usually around Halloween, this year I was inspired to make this an ongoing, weekly assignment.

In September, across my entire student body, I assigned lyric writing as such: Usually each class chooses a “theme” (i.e. back to school, pets, vacations, siblings, grandparents, nature, the color ____, etc.). Next, the students pick any Playlist song to write their lyrics to (they do this at home, and they have to choose a different song each week). The following week, at the lesson, just after checking in and looking at Playlists, each student plays while the class sings along with the lyrics that the student has written. Sometimes, we do the lyrics/playlist review in the middle or at the end of the lesson.

I asked each student to have a special note book just for their lyric writing, and to name each song, date it, and write to what SM song it is sung. The results have been fantastic! Here are my observations, 2 months into this “stream.”

1. The students LOVE it and can’t wait to have their lyrics heard each week. They ask about it and remind me if we have not started the lesson with it!

2. The students who struggled and/or resisted initially, with encouragement, support, and help from parents and me, have come so far and joined the party! It is pretty clear how much parents help their child in this assignment and I have discovered that the students who needed a lot of help at first are gradually weaning themselves of their parent’s participation in the assignment from week to week. I ask the parents how much percent they think they helped, and then I offer that the percentages go down as the students learn to take the reins. This has been especially helpful for students under 8 yrs. old and students who feel reluctant to improvise/compose.

3. It allows me to hear their Playlist songs regularly and in a fun and creative way. I suggest to everyone, and I may change it to a requirement, to start with Dreams even if the students are in upper levels and go through the songs once a week to revive any “lost” songs and enliven their playlists. I take it as an opportunity to fill in any gaps in Arrangements and Variations of those songs for more advanced students too.

4. It presents an opportunity to talk about the places in songs that have inherent strong beats and how to match lyrics to those places in the music, always the downbeats. In other words, students learn it does not flow to match strong syllables of words with weak beats and vice-versa in the song and we work on editing lyrics when needed to provide a natural flow to the lyrics.

5. It is totally fun for everyone and a great opportunity for lots of laughter and camaraderie. It also gives us all a window into each other’s lives through music.

I encourage everyone to add lyric writing as a regular, ongoing assignment if you are not already doing so. Besides playing games, the students see this part of the lessons as the best 5 minutes or less!