Yulia Polshtshikova

Narva Kreenholmi Gümnaasium, Estonia

Music is International

In the project “Learn it today to manage it tomorrow” one of two music lessons was put into practice, using digital materials that were specially designed for that purpose.

The lesson was held for 10 class students of the school centre Srečko Kosovel  Sežana (Slovenia) by Julia Polshtshikova, the teacher of  Kreenholm Gymnasium (Narva, Estonia).

The main goal of the lesson in the international group of project participants was to show that the musical communication language will help everyone to understand each other and ultimately get an interesting product of joint musical creativity!

The theme of the lesson was “Music Around Us”. General competencies developed during the lesson were, first of all, intercultural competence (listening and analyzing works of Finish composer, French song performance in different ways and different languages), as well as computational competence (performance of tasks by analogy).

There were digital tutorials designed for the lesson that were uploaded in https://prezi.com/view/yuQUHinwleLXaUPMRl51/. For delivering educational materials a set of eight bells with a certain pitch, improvised items such as pens, pencils, etc. and a presentation prepared in the Prezi program were used.   

During the lesson, students completed two different musical tasks.  

In the first task, "Orchestra without musical instruments," students tapped the rhythm in different ways, turning their body and objects at hand into different percussion instruments. Then they listened and analyzed the work of Jean Sibelius Water Droplets and performed a beautiful rhythmic accompaniment for this work.

In the second task, “Eight sounds of one musical instrument”, students used their ear for music and placed the bells in the correct order, learned how to play them and listen to each other, and then listened to two different versions of the song Brother Jacob.

At the end of the lesson, the students all together performed the instrumental version of the song Brother Jacob on the bells and eight students under the guidance of the teacher-conductor turned into one musical instrument. According to students’ feedback, the lesson material was interesting and understandable; mostly they liked the unusual musical tasks in the lesson. For the first time, they used their body and improvised objects as percussion musical instruments, and for the first time they played on bells of such different pitch. At the end of the lesson, students expressed the wish to try themselves in the role of a conductor. 

The lesson was an interesting experience of teaching for an international group.