Digital Story Telling

Content: Old MacDonald

First Grade, Standard 1 Objective 3
Develop and use skills to communicate ideas, information, and feelings.

1. Recognize and express feelings in a variety of ways (e.g., draw, paint, tell stories, dance, sing).
2. Express how colors, values, and sizes have been controlled in artworks to create mood, tell stories, or celebrate events.
3. Sing a melody independently, with developing accuracy and a natural voice that is free from strain.
4. Create simple rhythm, movement, and melody patterns with body percussion and instruments.

This standard was taken from the Utah State Core Curriculum for First Grade Language Arts.

Pedagogy: Farm Animals and Literacy- I chose this because not only am I going into Elementary Education but because I am also a Music Educator and so I wanted to link up classroom teaching with music teaching. Children love animals and I thought by singing this song children could solidify what farm animals are versus forest or jungle animals. They could learn also to recognize the word symbols that belong to each animal in this presentation duck, pig, cow, horse, chick, and sheep and also expand upon it and discover even more farm animals that have been unexplored. The children would also be able to write about a farm animal themself and create a Digital Story from this experience.

As a Music Educator, I would be looking for the above standards and objectives throughout this project in the child's development musically as well as bridging the content with the Language Arts area. What is fun about Old MacDonald is, if I were doing this with children I would use the animal's sound opportunity for some vocal play, while singing, dancing, and improving our musical abilities. The Digital Story part allows us to focus on the visual arts aspect which will help children better connect with the feeling of the music when they can visualize what some of the possibilites are visually for this song.

Technology: iMovie and Garage Band- I used this technology because this is what I had available over this past weekend to create the Digital Story Telling assignment. The iMovie was to create the story of what Old MacDonald had on his farm and the sounds each animal made, as well as the Garage Band which recorded my singing and playing the guitar for this song and story.