Creativity should be an essential part of music education. Not only can we include small creative elements into our lessons, but we can include bigger creative activities for our students as well. For ideas to incorporate small creative elements into class, check out Creativity In the Music Room Every Class! Part 1
Here are some ways that we can include bigger creative projects in the music class.
Big Projects
- A lot of the activities above work for bigger projects too, but motives can be longer, or written out as individual work.
- Sound stories – take a story and add creative elements to the story
- Orffestrations the students create
- Composing worksheets – There are lots of composing worksheets that allow for small compositions (4-16 beats) within parameters such as a theme. This is one of the composing sheets I have in my TpT store. There are several other themes available such as Halloween, Musical Instruments, Color and more.
- Digital Composing: Mario Paint, Groove Pizza, Chrome Music Lab, Incredibox, or traditional notation style composing such as Noteflight, Musescore, or Flat.io.
Movement Too!
- Movement exploration – like vocal explorations, but allows them to see what they can do. Moving just one part of their body, or moving in a certain position (like while bent over touching their toes, or kneeling on one knee) allows students to be creative.
- Freeze Dance – Freeze like a … when the music is turned off. In this case the students have to interpret the directions and be creative in that way. If you say freeze like a squirrel, it could be a squirrel running, climbing, eating an acorn or any other activity.
- Folk Dance Creation – check out this free lesson plan that helps your students create their OWN dance.
- Plastique Animée – I’ll flat out say this is not something I know a lot about, but it is a part of Dalcroze style teaching. It is the analysis of music, through movement.
- Human Puzzle – (This may be called Tableau or Statues but I am not 100% sure, so please don’t quote me with those names!) One at a time, a student moves, and adds themselves to the puzzle and freezes in that position. Essentially they add to the negative space around the already frozen people without touching them. It can be a small movement that they use to get there. Set this to music to set the mood, make it a theme (add yourself to the picture pretending to be at…the park/a museum/eating nachos/etc).
I hope this is helpful!
