INSIGHT Hitting the right note
It’s not every day an orchestra is asked to develop a series of short films for network television. And yet, by the end of the spring term, 10 musical films of stories from around the world will be available on the BBC Teach website and BBC iPlayer as part of the Musical Storyland series, after being broadcast on CBeebies. Every tale has been chosen by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra with help from early years specialists, Note Weavers, and international storyteller, Jan Blake. The music has been
composed by Daniel Whibley who writes music for live stage shows and many radio and television productions.
Every Musical Storyland film is accompanied by downloadable teacher notes and two display images: the first identifies the instruments featured in the film and the second, the vocabulary used. The activities have been carefully created for all teachers, regardless of your musical ability or experience. What’s more, they can be used across all four nations.
We know that many children do not have the opportunity to access live orchestral music. In fact, the idea for the Gingerbread Man film came from an interactive workshop developed by one of our cellists
Comment by JENNIFER REDMOND, BBC Teach Producer
with two fellow musicians. We wanted to give as many children as possible the chance to see musicians playing instruments, and in a way that would appeal to them. When the pandemic struck and we were unable to visit schools, we decided to film the workshop to continue to give children the opportunity to watch musicians perform up close. For Musical Storyland, instruments play an integral part in telling every story. The eagle-eyed amongst you will have spotted that our films feature every instrument of the orchestra. They also feature instruments from other traditions such as the guzheng, n’goni, djembe, calabash, and tabla. Working with Note Weavers, we paid close attention to the songs, making sure they were written at the right range for young voices to join in with comfortably and at speeds that they can master. You will notice that our films feature a mix of singing and chanting with a lot of repetition. And we paid close attention to connecting every element of Musical Storyland not only o the music curriculum, but also to areas of the wider curriculum. In fact, it covers all seven areas of learning at early foundation stage: from communication and language to literacy as well as understanding the world.
When we set out on our journey to bring our ideas for Musical Storyland to life, we wanted to create high quality entertainment with a strong educational foundation. It is our hope that the stories spark a love of music, singing and musical instruments among a new generation of young children that lasts a lifetime.
For more information about Musical Storyland, head over to the BBC Teach website
www.bbc.co.uk/teach
How to develop “The Superpower of Looking” in your school Comment by SAL McKEOWN, journalist and editor
Over 1 billion photos are uploaded every day and yet our education system does not teach young people how to look, analyse or interpret images. When we talk about make learners work ready, or teaching young people the skills need for the jobs of the future, we rarely mention the need for visual literacy. This was brought home to me recently when I spotted a job as a researcher. I expected the post would call for good writing skills and the ability to interpret statistics. However, I was surprised to see that the successful candidate would need to have good
skills with Canva, a free-to-use online graphic design tool often used to create social media posts.
Learning to look is not just a skill for marketing, social media or similar careers. It is a talent in demand in many walks of life. Amy Herman is president of The Art of Perception, Inc. She travels the world helping police officers, medics and scientists among others to improve their observation and perception skills. When she took police officers to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art to look at paintings, their crime solving rate went up. ‘The idea was not for me to come in to teach them how to be better police officers,’ she said. ’The idea was to help them be more effective. I’m enabling them to use their inherent power of observation to look for things that would
March 2024 have otherwise been off the radar.’
A curriculum for visual literacy involves learning about composition, colour and space and to develop the language needed to analyse and describe images that children see all around them. However, while we may all agree that this is a vital skill for the 21st century, the challenge is to fit it into an already overcrowded curriculum. Primary Colours, a report from the Fabian Society, says that 45% of primary teachers in England feel they lack the skills needed to enhance visual learning and 56% feel that the schools do not have the resources to deliver arts education.
To solve the problem, Art UK and the Freelands Foundation have developed The Superpower of Looking, a project for primary schools. It requires no specialist knowledge as it comes with lesson plans, videos and talking prompts. There are over 300,000 hi-res images of works of art so the class can zoom in and out to get the big picture or to home in on fine details. The art gallery comes to you, and you don’t need to stand on tiptoes or pore over other people’s shoulders.
Pilot projects in England and Scotland have been successful. Pupils were enthusiastic and keen to share their observations and opinions. After learning some of the key skills, children said they would like to go to a museum or art gallery in their own time. Now The Superpower of Looking Is available free of charge to every primary school in the UK.
Further details:
https://artuk.org/learn/the-superpower-of-looking
https://fabians.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/FS-Primary-Colours- Report-WEB-FINAL.pdf
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