Drip 11 ~ teaching creativity to tweens

May 012009

A colleague and I were sitting at a staff meeting at our school where we teach and as I listened to the negativity being tossed around something snapped in my brain and I turned to her and said – Let’s write a musical with the kids – and surprisingly she said – Yeah, let’s do something positive and fun -

We began our journey by soliciting poems from a general pool of students and then with a select group of student writers we wove those into a musical. My language arts colleague and I won an award from our school district that year for our initiative in working with kids and getting them to express themselves creatively. When we got the award (a small engraved cup) my son immediately took it and poured M&M’s into it and claimed it as his own.

So we’re at it again this year and this is what was dripping from my brain pan last week: how to arrange these rough songs that myself and three other 13 yr olds were hashing out. The kids came up with all of the lyrics with minor prompts from me, and the music evolved from us singing as we wrote lyrics. The melodies from these songs were all student driven, I just added the production and arrangement. The songs will be performed with a live band of 12 yr olds (and me) and these kids rock, so the live versions will sound pretty damned close to what you hear (minus me singing out of my key).

The story is called “In The Middle” and is about two sisters one of which is trying to fit in and still keep a relationship with her younger, nerdy sister (thus she’s “in the middle”. There’s also a side story about a transfer student from Ecuador (we have a large population of second language learners) who is being judged on his appearance and accent. All topics that middle school-ers are caught up in and have to deal with on a daily basis.

It’s amazing how creative kids are and if given the right environment how they can produce something as good as any adult. I loved talking about the creative process with the kids. We would often write something and get only so far with it and then I would say -Let’s put this to the side or even throw it out because it is not working- and they would get freaked out because they had worked on it so long and wanted to force it, but then they’d see a different way and we’d breeze on through. Sometimes we even came back to lyrics or ideas we has discarded because they worked elsewhere. Fun! The show goes up the first week of June, 2009. Let me know if you want tickets!!!

So here are some of the songs – again, I am singing for demo purposes.

Creatively -

~dg~

Music From “In The Middle” by students from Turn of River Middle School

“Waiting Song” – verse 2