The project “My favorite song” is well suited as an introduction to a new learning group. With this opener that’s based on everyday life, you’ll get an overview of your children’s and teens’ musical passions and can see what sort of and to what degree they already possess digital and musical skills, plus you’ll see which competencies can be fostered.
The children and teens start out by researching background information on the Internet about their own favorite band and then they introduce a song of their favorite bands to each other. Together as a group, the various music styles are discussed and categorized, so that the collected songs can be mapped to their respective styles.
Split into groups, the children and teens then have a look at the video platform YouTube with the question in mind: What should we be aware of when setting up our own YouTube channel? In the last step, a YouTube channel will be set up for the group, and all the previously discussed songs will be loaded into the playlist.
They collect the background information about their favorite band and pick a song/video to present.
Subsequently, the results will be presented separately.
Social form: individual work
Discuss with the whole group which kinds of music styles there are.
Discuss with your children and teens which songs could be associated with which music styles. Categorize them in the mind map.
Social form: group discussion
They gradually work through the criteria that must be observed when both downloading and uploading videos. They will then also look at the conditions for setting up their own channel.
They record their results in a Word document.
Social form: group work
Then they go a head and set up the YouTube channel.
The next step is for them to link all of their individual videos to the channel. They then pick out tags for their videos and write summaries.
They follow up by thinking about who might be interested in the groupchannel and what other sources they might connect their channel to, so that they get some positive feedback from other users.
Social form: group discussion
The end of the project is transferable to other subjects, for example, it can be used in English class. In this way, classes could also gain knowledge about the various specific genres, for instance, the children and teens could put together a collection of well-known jazz artists. Another possibility would be to put together a channel of videos from all the children and teens who play music.