Every few years, my students do a creative “Story in Sound” project for our Christmas recital. It is very easy to implement and the students and audience seem to enjoy it immensely. It’s not too late to do this for your Christmas recital this year, so I thought I’d share how we do this.
1. Pick a children’s Christmas story with a lot of onamonapia and action words and phrases. A perfect example of this is The Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett.
2. Go through the book, pulling out and writing down all the action words and phrases and onamonapia. Examples of this would be:
- “They popped him in the oven. Tick, tock. Matti peeked. Too soon! Out jumped the gingerbread boy!”
- “He ran by the cat. She sprang at him.”
- “…a mama pig tried to catch him. But then he jumped into the air, twisted around and got away just in time…” (There are many more in this book.)
3. Hand out 1 of these action words or phrases to each of your students and ask them to compose a short musical motive that depicts what is happening in the phrase or word.
4. At the recital, you or another student will read the Christmas story book and the students will quickly go to the piano and play their motive as you are reading. Depending on their motive you may pause for effect, slow down your reading rate, or do other things to make the sound effect come alive.
5. At the end of the Christmas story, each of the students can quickly come to the stage (or stay on the stage) and give a team bow to the audience as would be done at a Broadway show.
Here are some variations that we have incorporated through the years:
- One of my oldest students wanted to write a theme song for our story one year. I help him write a short version of the story to introduce it and then a longer, more broad version for the ending. It was particularly effective to have this theme song as book ends for the story.
- Some of my students have better narrator voices than I, so I am happy to turn over the reading of the book when a student expresses interest.
- One year, instead of using a Christmas storybook, I asked students to tell me if they had a Christmas poem or prose which was particularly meaningful to them. Several older students brought out their parent’s old Ideals magazines and pulled out some beautiful readings to which their siblings or other students played beautiful background Christmas music while they read.
What a great idea! I love doing Sound Stories with my students. I really like the idea of taking a story or poem and having them create a motive.
Excellent idea!! And just in time, too!
I love it! What a great idea!
Wendy,
I just wanted to say thanks again for this idea. I ended up doing it at last week’s Christmas camp and the students had a great time!
This week, I have a new group of students for camp and I want to record them doing it. Something I wish I had done for my other two groups.
That’s fabulous, Jennifer! Thanks for letting me know. I’m glad it was useful. What book did you use?