Primary Music Websites

The Dallas Symphony Orchestra and San Francisco Symphony are both brilliant free music resources. They include recordings of instruments to help students to listen to and recognise the instruments of the orchestra. There are also some great activities including the Sfskids ‘composerizer‘ area where melodies can be composed.

DSO was one of the first websites highlighted on Primary Nuggets back in September 2006, for a list of all the music websites mentioned so far, click on Music under Quick Links.

 

Sing Up

Sing Up is a new, national project that aims to encourage singing in primary schools. Once you have registered you can download songs and lesson plans to use in the classroom. You also recieve a free copy of the termly magazine which contains a CD of at least 10 songs, backing tracks and teacher notes. 

Topic Box

Regular visitors to the Coxhoe Durham or Snaith Primary websites will appreciate just how useful it is to have all those online educational resources in one place. I have just read about a new one called Topic Box on the Little Miss Teacher blog and have been to have a look around. The brightly coloured and easy to navigate website aims to electronically replace those dusty old plastic storage boxes which look promising but generally fail to deliver. Already there are 2131 resources in 174 different topics which can be rated by anyone who downloads them. Tell your friends and let me know if you come across any other similar sites.

 

First Attempt at Podcasting

I had a great morning working with a small group of year 4 children and experimenting with podcasting. Using Podium by Softease it was really straight forward to record voices, add sound effects and music. The royalty free music came from the incompetech website.

I use apple’s itunes to collect and listen to podcasts which is free to download. Once itunes is installed and open, click on ‘Advanced’ and then ‘Subscribe to Podcast..’ Paste the following URL into the box to hear Sarah and Caitlin’s joke. 

http://www.podiumpodcasting.com/~182489/SR250607202723/rss.xml

Next we hope to podcast a school radio show just like the wonderful shows already happening in Wiltshire at Fitzmaurice and St Marks Primary schools.

Making Music

There are a vast range of free musical composition websites available, from the simple (and strangely amusing) ‘Doo wop horses’, to the more advanced (and trendy) Groove Blender.  

Finale is commercially available music notation software that offers a free introduction to their product called Notepad. Simply register with an email address and download the software here.

WARNING! if you try any of these websites out with your class it won’t be long before you’ll be needing  a set of headphones.

For information about composers or digital sound recorders visit the other Music posts on this blog.

A Sound Recorder

Audacity is a free to download piece of recording software which is easy to use in the classroom in a variety of ways including recording children’s musical compositions or for speaking and listening projects. Useful features include being able to record a number of tracks on top of each other and edit them as required. There are also tools to manipulate the sounds recorded. Don’t forget to connect a microphone to the computer. Find out more about audacity including tutorials at Wikipedia

It is free to download from a number of sources including here

Investigate an Orchestra

The Dallas Symphony Orchestra website contains a range of activities and information for children (and teachers) about composers and instruments. 

The Music Room contains an Instrument Encyclopedia (on the piano) where you can hear individual instruments each play the same piece of music. Whereas in the teacher’s lounge there are fact sheets and information about composers.