Colt students hone language skills making music videos
Emily Hilley-Sierzchula/Fifth-grade boys at Colt Elementary get excited while brainstorming ideas for a music video about a favorite song, Twenty One Pilots' "Stressed Out."
By Emily Hilley-Sierzchula
Not too often do fifth-graders shoulder titles like assistant director, camera operator and prop designer, but it’s just in a days work for Colt Elementary music class students.
All fifth-graders are in Esther Jones’s music class, but music just isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. However, add to the mix a project like making a music video and kids ambivalent about music class came alive as they worked on productions based on their favorite songs.
“It almost gave me chills watching them,” Orts said. “Kids who normally aren’t excited about music class became really engaged, leading brainstorming sessions and showing interest in finding creative camera angles.”
Marble Falls High School audio-visual (A/V) students already have started editing some footage, with more to come. They’ll weave students’ clips into music videos to post on YouTube, making it a cross-campus collaboration.
“Students are really, really excited about having their videos on YouTube,” Orts said. “It’s their end goal.”
It’s about more than feeling like a pop star, however.
The videos are a cross-curricular project, combining language arts and music, Orts explained.
“We started by talking about the arrangement of stories in general, how they have a beginning, middle and end,” she said.
Students then applied the idea of a story to their songs. “We brainstormed what kinds of stories could come out of each song,” Orts said. “They related roles to their personal life, which also makes it more authentic.”
For more on this story, see The Highlander on Friday, April 15.
