Being relatively new to my school, I’m still adjusting to a schedule where I see students only once a week—a major shift after 21 years of seeing them twice a week. This change has required me to recalibrate my expectations, activities, and overall approach.
In the past, I just associated Seesaw with online/virtual teaching (oof! A wave of anxiety rolls over me when I hear virtual teaching!). However, now I’ve found that Seesaw assignments for music can help reinforce a lot of the skills I’m working on in class. The intention is for these activities to be done OUTSIDE our regular meeting time.
From recorder and ukulele activities, in which students record themselves and submit their recordings, to elemental composition projects, Seesaw can provide students with that little bit of extra practice outside of the classroom.
How am I using Seesaw? Other than sharing student work with parents, I’m also using it for:
- rhythmic reading/creating
- literacy
- assessment
- sub-Plans!
If you are new to creating music assignments for students, consider beginning with the Community Resource Library within Seesaw. There, you will find hundreds of activities you can build upon and use as a template for creating your own assignments.
Rhythm: Seesaw is great for rhythmic work because kids can listen, write, manipulate, and record themselves! You don’t have to reinvent the wheel!
Here’s something simple: Because I work at an international school and my students speak an array of different languages, many have difficulty transferring text (English) to rhythm. This activity from Manju Durairaj addresses this perfectly and offers a starting point for making your own.
Literacy: Seesaw is great for reinforcing music literacy. You can design an activity where students drag and drop rhythmic or melodic patterns to match a given song or phrase, helping them practice notation skills. Maybe students need a little help creating a “B” section within a larger song or piece….here is an example of an
assignment by Angela Leonhardt for the folk song “Johnny’s Gone To Tea,” which can be found in Purposeful Pathways 1. This activity offers students the initial stages for composition and requests that they reflect using the prompts, “I wonder, I notice, I value.” (Thank you, Jane Frazee for those wonderful provocations, right Angela?!)
Another idea is to have students record themselves clapping rhythms or singing solfège patterns (I love this one), reinforcing their aural and visual understanding. How about using the drawing tools?! Students can identify elements like dynamics, note values, or pitch relationships. For some ages, I would suggest using the drawing tools over drop and drag manipulatives because students need to practice writing simple symbols that later develop into notation systems that are relevant to them.
Take some of these activities a step further, and Seesaw can help students compose their own pieces. Here’s a great one: Erin Caughlan created an activity for recorder that checks a lot of boxes! Students: Create a recorder piece, practice notation, demonstrate their understanding of fingerings, and record themselves. There’s also so much you can use as an assessment for this!
There’s also great potential for using Seesaw as part or all of a sub-plan, too.
Go ahead and allow yourself to fall down the Seesaw rabbit hole, and enjoy exploring all these possibilities for the music room!