Your first question is probably “What exactly IS a Composer Fair?” I think it is something that I made up. Think of it like an art fair, but instead of looking at art your students created, you are looking at music compositions that they wrote. It all started when I wrote a grant for some supplies for my classroom. Part of the grant required me to share the product of the grant with the community, and my solution: a Composer Fair!
What to Prepare
Obviously, in order to have a fair where you show off compositions, you need your students to have written some songs. I have at least one song project that I routinely do with my grades 2-5. But these are long-term projects and require a little planning. You will need to think about when you want the fair to be, when you want projects to be completed by and how much class time it will take the students to complete the project. So plan ahead.
Here are some examples of what kinds of work my students did. Stay tuned for a post very soon where you can get more info on the specific worksheets.
2nd Grade
3rd Grade
4th Grade
5th Grade
Preparing For the Big Night
Decide if you want to display all student’s work, or just some of the top examples. I kind of went for a middle of the road approach. I picked some of the best work and put it on display boards. All the rest were put in binders organized by class.
Each binder explained on the front what skills we were working on with the song (theme and variation, learning BAG on the staff, etc).
For the ones that went on display, I actually typed them up using Finale, to make them look more official. I also saved those Finale files to a USB drive. Then, on the night of the Composer Fair, I had a laptop out in the lobby and Featured Composers (the kids who got to have their work on display) could have their family put on headphones and listen to their song. This was by far the biggest hit of the night.
Speaking of being a big hit, I was not sure what kind of turn out this event would get, so I made sure to team up with the Book Fair. That way, there was traffic coming in from that. Also, it doesn’t really take a long time to look at your piece of music, so this allowed families something to do after the had finished looking at their child’s work.
Why I Highly Recommend Doing This Event – and Why I’ll Be Doing It Again
So there are two main reasons that I loved this event. First of all, most of what parents see of music class (if anything) are the music performances. And that is great. Obviously music performance is a big part of music. BUT, it is not everything. It is only a sliver of what happens in music class. I don’t think most families have a clue the depth of things that their student is learning in music class. They figure that we just sing some cute songs and that is it. So far from the truth! So I loved getting a chance to sort of open up the music classroom to them and let them really see what their child is capable of.
Secondly, I loved being able to show students and parents the progression of the curriculum from one year to the next. After having a third graders show their parents the song they created using BAG on the staff, I can bring them over to the fourth grade table and say – now look! Next year you’ll be able to create your own variation on Hot Cross Buns. So parents could really see the growth that their student had achieved and understand that music class does, in fact, have a curriculum.
So this event kind of turned into music curriculum awareness night for me, but in a way that was so fun for the kids and parents. The kids were so proud and the parents were so impressed. I had no idea how the event would go, but happily, it was a surprise success for everyone!
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8 Responses
Have you ever put QR codes on the board so people can hear the compositions? Just thought that might add to the event.
I haven’t tried that yet, but love the idea! I have typed songs into Finale and then had a little laptop with headphones and they could select their file and play it. But it required a lot of man hours to type up all the songs into Finale. What type of file/recording do you link to the QR code? That would be so much easier for this year!