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Soupy Sounds Is:
A CD compirising of 26 songs, one for each letter of the alphabet. There are so many different styles of music used, and so many ways to add colour and spice to each song.
There is a possibility of the package expanding at a later stage, please let me know if there are resources you would find helpful for your classroom.
The Story:
My teaching career began as a grade 1 teacher. This is a baptism of fire for a young male university graduate. The school I was teaching at were looking into music based reading and phonics programs (there are quite a few out there, some good, some dodgy as).
The particular program they considered using was both too expensive and too time consuming in terms of teacher training and classroom time. I think a lot of the time teachers have plenty of good programs running and we are looking for supplements to our good ideas, not a whole new program to learn.
So, anyway, the school decided not to use this program. I was still convinced that music based learning was a good idea. Songs have a way of bypassing your defence mechanisms and getting into your long term memory. They are fun, engaging, involve several different forms of intelligence processes, and they are memorable.
With that thought, I decided to make songs for each sound of the alphabet as my class was covering these sounds. I would ask the whole class to write a sentence with a particular letter in mind. For example, I would say "today you're writing a song for the letter s, which makes the sound sssssssss." We would brainstorm and then I would let them go for it.
Afterwards I would read these sentences. There are many things I know I can't do in a musical sense, but one thing I can do is hear a song and compose. so I would read these sentences and listen for the song within them. When I found it I composed the song, which we would all sing the next day. It was an exciting time for the class to hear whose song had become the superhit, our own version of "Classroom Idol."
26 of these lessons lead to 26 songs. Each song that is now on the Soupy Sounds CD has been sung hundreds of times since they were created. Some of the original compositions didn't last this testing process. We got bored with them, and so a new song has been written. 2 of the songs were written when I used this concept on a month long teaching trip to Uganda in 2002 (one is the M song, which you can listen to on this myspace page).
These are NOT songs which some music producer has whipped together in 10 minutes for a McEducation Meal. The process of refining and testing in many different contexts means that you are getting a quality package of songs which has the feel of a school playground song but the educational quality professional teachers deserve.
So that is the story of how the songs were born, I hope I wasn't like one of those parents that gives too many childbirth details, and hope this is helpful in looking at the Soupy Sounds package.
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