Overview. Elementary students explore music composition using remix practices to consider their target audience and purpose while developing creativity and collaboration skills.

Objectives. Students will:

• understand that popular songs have a purpose, a message, and a target audience
• label the basic structural elements of song lyrics: verse, chorus, and bridge
• strengthen creativity and collaboration through composing rhymes and performing new lyrics for an existing song

Resources and Materials

• Instrumental (or "karaoke") backing track
• Original version of song
• Brainstorming Worksheet
• Chart paper

Engage

• Explain to students that some musicians are like authors because they compose messages to create new songs.
• Play the original version of the song. Children may enjoy two opportunities to listen to the song once with their ears and once with their bodies (through movement or dance).

Analyze

• Ask: What do you like about this song? What do you dislike? Encourage children to identify specific features of the song (beat, lyrics, chorus, instruments, melody, rhyme, etc)
• Discuss: What are the key phrases and ideas (or the characters and story) of the song? Write these messages down on the board. To get a full list of phrases, students might need to listen to the song again with this purpose in mind.

Create

• Play the karaoke version and ask them what is different about this version. Invite children to share what they already know about karaoke as a form of creative play.
• Introduce the activity: Create new lyrics for this song to communicate a specific message (about an upcoming school event) to inform and entertain a specific target audience.
• Show an example of work created by other students using the "Teach Me Media" video created by students at the Russell Byers Charter School
• Small groups of students work together to develop their lyrics, working under deadline pressure. Invite different small groups to create lyrics for different target audiences (younger children, grandparents, boys, girls, mothers, teachers, teenagers, etc)
• Use brainstorming and improvisation techniques to imagine new lyrics that fit with the music and rhythm of the original song by modifying the message and the purpose within the structure of the song to inform and entertain the target audience.
• Each team performs their work and records the new songs using simple audio or video production tools  

Reflect

• Ask: How did your group's lyrics aim at your target audience? Encourage students to explain their choices.
• Discuss: What are some other differences between the new song you created and the original song? Write some of these ideas on the board.
• Discuss: Some people might think that writing new lyrics to an existing song is not that creative. Other people might think it is example of creative work. What do you think?
• What was fun about this project? What was challenging or difficult?
• What did you notice about how your team worked together?

Conclude

• Explain that the process of using parts of other people's creative work to create your own messages is called remix.  It is an example of the "fair use" of copyrighted materials. Remix is an important way to express ideas and can help people develop confidence in their capacity for creative work.

--Created by David Cooper Moore