Category Archives: Songwriting

Class brainstorming sheet with ideas about cheetahs.

A happy collision of ideas produced a great surprise for one of my classrooms of six- and seven-year-olds – a metaphor!

As I have done for several years in the spring, I am working with six classrooms of first grade students at the Condon School in South Boston to write class songs.

Each student submitted ideas for their class song. I asked people to consider topics in science or social studies. Most of the students chose topics from the world of science. In some classrooms, a number of people seemed to coalesce around the same idea. Many kids in one room favored ladybugs. Another class had many fans of Neil Armstrong and his walk on the moon. In another class, a particular student was such a fan of ancient Egypt that we felt compelled to choose his idea.

But in one classroom, the ideas were all over the map: tigers, cheetahs, dogs, the moon, stars, and a lone nomination of Sonic the Hedgehog (fictional characters were discouraged). Among several of the papers, I found a common thread: the students who liked creatures liked the ones who can go very fast.

Another paper surfaced in the same class on the topic of shooting stars. At the bottom, the student had written, “a cat.” I asked if she was trying to make a connection between a cat and a star. She said no, it was just a mistake.

Mistake? This is the creative process! There are no mistakes. We moved on to a discussion of metaphor, and the next thing I knew, we had a refrain for our song:

“They go fast, they go far, like a shooting star.”

Okay, technically that’s a simile. I didn’t get into the finer points.

I beefed up the content by sharing a bit of Internet research on the fastest creatures on land, in the air and in water.  We soon found that a peregrine falcon, who can move fastest of any creature, can dive for prey at over 200 miles per hour. Yowzah! Many students were fans of the cheetah, the fastest land animal. The black marlin is the fastest sea creature.

We brainstormed about these creatures, with me jotting down all the students’ ideas and helping to turn them into rhyming lines. Soon, a new song was born. I hope to post a good recording soon.

Here is a link to my previous posts on writing songs with children. http://www.antelopedance.com/uncategorized/from-brainstorming-to-creating-a-new-song/

In my last blog piece, I talked about getting the creative process going with children through brainstorming – essentially making lists of ideas.  Brainstorming is the time for broad-brushing and “all over the map” thinking.  But how do all those the brainstorm ideas become a song?

The short answer is not all of them do.  Your big list gets narrowed down; you and the students choose what’s most compelling and interesting.  Some ideas get left behind, but that’s not a bad thing.

My own process varies from classroom to classroom.  Sometimes, a list of ideas may turn into the chorus or verse of the song.  This happened in one of my first-grade classes at the Condon School in South Boston, where the students were working on a song about animals that live in the local area.  Here’s the first verse:

Pigeons, butterflies and frogs

Rabbits, skunks, raccoons and dogs

Seagulls, hawks, mice and rats

Caterpillars, bees and cats.

Pretty simple – a list! I got the “list” idea from Jessica Anne Baron, founder and executive director of Guitars in the Classroom.  This program provides basic instruction in guitar for classroom teachers, so they can use it in their teaching practice. Great teaching technique: write songs with students!

Jessica says that making lists can be a wonderful basis for a class-created song that delivers information students need to learn. The teacher doesn’t even need to make up the tune – just use one from the public domain, such as “The Wheels on the Bus” or “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” These are both two-chord songs, very easy to play on guitar, ukulele or autoharp. Imagine a list of mammals to the tune of “Whole World.”  Or vegetables, or amphibians.  Modes of transportation can be put to “Wheels on the Bus.”

I almost always write original tunes with my classes, although often they sound a lot like other tunes. But that’s true generally – many songs sound a little bit or even a lot like something else; it’s happened throughout the history of music.

A songwriting teacher can use various processes for making up tunes. You can ask a brave student to stand up and sing the lyrics you’ve just written, and hope the tune will stick.  You can bring a recording device and record all the ideas, then put together the best ones.

I’ve also used a melody-shape method suggested by composer Nick Page in his book Music as a Way of Knowing. Page writes, “You have to know that all melodies have shapes. Some are ascending lines, some are descending … When students understand the concept, begin creating shapes.” I tried this once with some kindergarteners in writing my song “Nihao, Jambo, Hola.” The students drew wavy lines that went up or down at the end and we sang them. The song ends on a high note because that’s how a student drew the line!

There’s no one right or wrong way to do any of these things. You can do it one way, then change it for a different age group or a different class dynamic. Do what’s most comfortable. It might fall apart; that’s okay. If the song’s a total mess at the end of class, take it home and do repair work. The end product will still reflect the students’ ideas, and they’ll still have fun singing it – 99 percent guaranteed.

This piece first appeared in a slightly different version on the blog of The Children’s Music Network. 

Parts of this piece were originally published on The Children’s Music Network Blog.

One of my early inspirations for songwriting with kids was hearing about a residency that Steve Roslonek (SteveSongs) did at an elementary school years ago. After spending a week gathering ideas and brainstorming with the students, he wrote a whole musical called “The King, the Mice and the Cheese.” He got some professional musicians to come join him when the students performed the musical at their school.

Not everyone can write music like SteveSongs, but I wanted to give it a try. I started offering collaborative songwriting in several classes where I worked, and the results were really fun! Several songs on my CD, “Singing All the Way Home,” were inspired by class songwriting projects, including “The Three Piggy Opera,” my take on the Three Little Pigs story, which a Pre-K class was studying at the time and helped me compose.

The children in that Pre-K class – at Boston’s Gardner Pilot Academy – also helped me come up with a movement activity for the song, which has been hugely popular ever since. You can see a video of some older kids acting out this song here.

 I’ve just finished my third year of songwriting residencies with first-grade students at the Condon School in South Boston. This work was also inspired by two teaching artists whose work I admire.  Victor Cockburn of Troubadour, Inc., has been working for more than 30 years on integrating music and songwriting into the English Language Arts curriculum in the greater Boston area.  By visiting schools with Victor, I saw how he teaches children about rhyming couplets, ballad form, and using expressive language, among many topics.

I also got some valuable tools from the work of Paul Reisler, who runs a Virginia-based organization called Kid Pan Alley.  Paul does songwriting residencies in schools, and often asks well-known musicians to record the final products.  In a workshop with Paul at the Rocky Mountain Song School, I learned about brainstorming techniques that can produce imaginative song topics and well-developed musical products.

I am very excited that Paul will be a workshop leader at The Children’s Music Network Conference this fall on September 19-21, 2014 in Leesburg, VA. This conference is going to be awesome for people who already write songs for kids, or want to learn more about becoming songwriters. These conferences are great for teachers and librarians who love music, as well as for professional musicians who work with kids. CMN will have four different workshops on songwriting this fall!

Over the next few weeks, I hope to post more reflections on my songwriting work with students.