Listening Exercise

Elementary School Children Listening Exercise:

As artist-in-residence at Lake Bluff Elementary, I spent time with their third grade art class, playing different recordings I had made, and asked them to make a drawing based on what we were listening to. The results were somewhat similar, either from them looking at what their neighbor was drawing, or the sounds simply being so non-specific that they each assumed this must be the sound of UFOs. So, I tried a different approach. In another class, they were putting on a play. I took all the lines from that play, and gave each of them a sentence from it, asking them to think about the sound that the sentence expressed. In some cases, this was obvious (for example, the sentence was something about a bell, so a bell sound was identified), but in others, it was very challenging, yet they all came up with something. They had to use material only available in the class room to generate these sounds. Once each student had their sound and how they would make it, we recorded each child reading their sentence, and then overdubbing their sound on top of it. The entire play was compiled in this way and made into a CD in a blank package that each student was given, allowing them to draw their own cover design based on their experience. You can listen to a sample from the project below:

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