In preparation for today’s class, the children were asked to bring in materials to make instruments (paper plates, boxes and things that could be used as decoration). Today was our first day to use the Elluminate software so we were trying to keep things pretty simple to start. We spent a good bit of time chatting and getting used to the idea that we were going to be using a tiny video window to see each other. Also, we spent time testing how sound translated over the software. I showed the children my studio and played some of the instruments I have, ranging from a really quiet shaker to my piano. As it turned out, the children could not hear the quiet shaker at all. So, we are all trying to get used to how sound is being communicated across this new medium.

Last week we spent time listening to sounds inside and outside the classroom but today’s task was to go and find them. Unfortunately, it was a really stormy day and raining in both Dublin and Warrenpoint, so this activity was kept short. The children and Mrs. English went on a walk through the school with their recording device and collected sounds. When they got back to class, Mrs. English emailed the sound file to me so I could listen more closely. The children then spent time telling me about the things they heard on their walk. There were lots of sounds on the recording that I could recognise (birds, footsteps, whispering, wind) but there was one sound that sounded like a jack hammer. The children and I listened back to the recording, in our own venues, to try to identify it more closely. It turns out that it was the hand drier! So, we had a good chat about how some sounds are easy to identify but others are not so easy and often sound like a variety of things. We had looked at this last week, when we explored ‘performing’ our heartbeats, so it was nice to see it crop up again. We can use this in a very creative way and hopefully will get a chance to create some interesting soundscapes in the coming weeks.

The recording served as a lovely way to focus on the sounds outside of the room and as a way to start our next exercise: to make a shaker. We began by choosing a sound from the recording and drawing that in order to decorate our shakers. The children made beautiful shakers as the first instrument in their own personal instrument bank.