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• Music Lesson: It’s Strictly Academic: The Patriot Ledger
  
• Weymouth Jazzes Up Its Lessons In Social Studies: Music teacher sets the facts to music: The Patriot Ledger
  
• Songs Help Students Learn Social Studies Facts: Weymouth News

Music Lesson: It’s Strictly Academic

Fractions and archeology aren’t typically what students sing about these days.

But ask fifth graders at Abigail Adams Middle School and they’ll tell you it’s what they enjoy.

“It helps me with my grades and helps me sing songs good,” said Tamila Fernandes, 11.

Fernandes and her classmates Friday performed a musical filled with melodies about academic subjects.

The musical featured eight curriculum-based songs written by music teacher Stephen MacDonald, four of which have been recorded on CDs.

“It gets the children to make the curriculum and the information their own because they have to express it and share it with others,” MacDonald said.

During the concert Friday, a lesson about the metric system turned into a rhythmic tune with lyrics like “A deci is a tenth of a meter” and “a kilo is one thousand grams.”

Students also rapped about fractions, sang about artifacts, and harmonized over their “say no to drugs” message.

“Dare to say ‘no’ and hold onto your dreams,” they belted out in front of a crowd of parents and students.

MacDonald said he hopes his songs and the musical he wrote help students retain information through a means outside textbooks.

He wrote the 12 tunes on his latest CD “Songs for Social Studies” as his master’s degree thesis at Cambridge College five years ago. The CD, recorded this year, includes an interactive CD-ROM featuring definitions of key words, lyrics, quizzes and crossword puzzles.

“My hope was to fully integrate music and curriculum together,” he said.

MacDonald’s students Stephanie D’Andrea and Kevin Sharuhan, 11, said the academic songs help them remember information.

Stephanie Giuffrida, 10, thinks MacDonald’s songs teach kids how to “stand up to peer pressure” and reject drugs and alcohol.

Classmate Megan Post, 11, has learned that “music is very important, and it has a meaning.”

For Anni Kim, MacDonald’s songs and musical have made learning fun.

“It’s better (than) just sitting down and reading a book,” she said.

Anyone interested in more information about MacDonald’s CD’s “D.A.R.E.” and “Songs for Social Studies” can e-mail him at stevenmac64@aol.com.

Eunice Kim may be reached at ekim@ledger.com.

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Weymouth Jazzes Up Its Lessons In Social Studies: Music teacher sets the facts to music

Thanks to Pingree School music teacher Stephen MacDonald, youngsters can now learn their history facts while singing the blues.

Or country and western.

Or even the exotic sounds of the Middle East.

MacDonald composed the songs to help fifth-grade students learn their early American history and geography facts more easily.

And with the help of engineer Jim Ricket, who runs the Creative Works studio in Quincy, MacDonald recorded the collection of 12 copyrighted “Songs for Social Studies.”

Compact discs recording the collection were handed out to Weymouth social studies teachers in October along with lyric sheets, he said. Teachers seemed enthusiastic about bringing the music into their lesson plans, he said.

“These are catchy little songs, I hope, that will help them remember” names, dates, and events, MacDonald said during a presentation to the school committee last month.

In a geography lesson, here’s how one verse goes about one of the “Five Regions of Our Country”:

“The Southeast Region used to produce mainly cotton crop/ But the nasty boll weevil put all that to a stop/ So the farmers diversified their crops and made more money/ And the tourists came there because it’s warm and sunny.”

MacDonald varies the melodies and rhythms to create a different mood that seems appropriate for the subject matter.

He used a melody with a Middle Eastern feel to it in “Archeologist and Artifacts” to describe early migrations and settlers in the Americas, such as the Mayans and Aztecs.

“A Slave’s Struggle,” portraying the tough lot of the slave in a South of plantations and cotton cash crops, echoes the musical style of a man singing the blues.

“They can feel what a slave might have been going through through the music,” says MacDonald, 37, a Hanover resident who has also written songs for the Weymouth schools’ Drug Abuse Resistance Education program.

Fittingly enough, MacDonald adapted three-part harmony, with him doing all the singing by harmonizing over himself, to explain how three branches of the federal government function in “The Balance of Power.”

A country and western sound flavors “Go West,” a song that recounts the country’s Western expansion with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. The song is loaded with historical references to explorers Lewis and Clark, their Indian guide Sacajawea, Daniel Boone and the Cumberland Gap.

In “The French Explorers,” students hear of the North American adventures of Cartier, Champlain, LaSalle and Joliet.

MacDonald says that eventually he would like to write songs to back up social studies from the first though fifth grades.

In his songwriting process, he starts by going to a classroom textbook to draw out a lesson and put it into poetic form, he said. Then he thinks of music that will enhance the poetry, he said “and seems to flow naturally together.” Fine-tuning that follows. Adjusting a phrase to fit the rhythm can be “a little tricky.” Then comes the finishing touches with any embellishments and the harmony, he said.

“It reaches the child on a different level. It’s not just intellectual,” MacDonald said.

Lessons set to music can be a helpful way to teach children with dyslexia or attention deficit problems or other learning disabilities, MacDonald said, because they often excel in music.

The idea of adapting music to support academic studies was the subject of his master’s degree thesis a couple of years ago, he said.

Assistant School Superintendent Christine Collins, who backs MacDonald’s experiment, agrees with its philosophy: “Music is a way to help children remember things and they’ll sing the songs with greater engagement than if we had just read to them.”

“We must not neglect the auditory memory,” Collins says, referring to a world containing a lot of visual stimulation that they current generation of students was born into.

Music paired with social studies represents one more stop of the schools’ long-standing attempt to integrate academic subjects and not teach subjects isolated one from thet other as was done many years ago, Collins said.

MacDonald, a 10-year Weymouth teacher, said he received some positive reaction when he made a presentation at a conference of the New England League of Middle Schools in Sturbridge last month.

When he made his presentation to the school committee, Vice Chairwoman Susan Peters said, “This is just wonderful” after MacDonald sang a couple of his songs while strumming his guitar.

A while ago, he said, he tried out his “Preparing for Liberty” song on his daughter Emily, who was 9 at the time and in the third grade.

If he asks her any question about that song – the story of the Boston Massacre, the Stamp Act and other events leading up to the American Revolution done to a Yankee Doodle-type of beat – Emily knows the answer.

Barry Smith may be reached at bsmith@ledger.com

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Songs Help Students Learn Social Studies Facts

The idea of using music as an aid to learning is at least as old as the Alphabet Song, but most of the existing repertoire, from “Captain Vegetable” to “Wee Sing Dinosaurs,” has been aimed at pre-school children.

Now Weymouth music teacher Stephen MacDonald has written and produced a CD of 12 songs to help primary and middle school students learn about archeology, geography and early American history.

“It’s a way of exposing children to a lot of fun facts and to important facts in a fun way,” said MacDonald, who originally wrote the songs for his thesis while earning a master’s in education at Cambridge College.

The melody, rhythm and repetition of a song can help most students to memorize information faster and retain it longer, he said.

“Music is considered one of the multiple intelligences. Each child has different strengths, so when you connect music with academics, you supply a missing link.”

MacDonald used a fifth grade social studies text to compose lyrics based on each chapter review. He then set the material to original music, with the form of music adapted to the lesson.

“Tribes Across the Countryside,” for example, is written in the style of Native American music, while “Slave Struggle” draws on the African American blues tradition.

“One of the songs, ‘Preparing for Liberty,’ is in a Yankee Doodle style, because it’s about the American Revolution and the patriots preparing to rebel against the Proclamation act and the Stamp Act and King George running the country from across the sea,” MacDonald said.

“Go West” is a country hillbilly song – complete with a big “Yeeha!” – and the lyrics cover a lot of territory, including the Louisiana Purchase from France, the Lewis and Clark expedition, Sacajawea, Daniel Boone and the Cumberland Gap.

“Rattle off ten seconds worth of lyrics and there’s a lot of information the kids learn intrinsically,” MacDonald said.

With the help of other teachers and parents in the community, MacDonald has developed lesson plans and additional curriculum materials to support the songs. Each comes with a lyric sheet, a definition page of key terms in the song, a crossword puzzle, a word-find page of key terms a quiz on the song, and an essay question.

“I’ve had some really positive responses,” he said. “Children who maybe didn’t participate in classes got more involved with the music. Children with learning disabilities and that type of thing were able to participate and retain more information.”

“Some teachers are saying some subject matter that is normally dry and not exciting to teach comes more alive.”

A song about “The Balance of Power,” for example, describes the roles of the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government – in three-part harmony:

“The balance of power between the branches three/ helps our government to run smoothly./ Each branch is responsible for checking the other,/ so every branch gets equal power.”

MacDonald made the social studies CD and lesson packet available to the fifth grade teachers in Weymouth last year, but said the songs cover subjects taught in younger grades, as well.

“My six-year old daughter just listens to the songs,” he said. “They could be for anyone of any age who likes music, a younger child or even an adult who wants to know about history without picking up a book.”

MacDonald presented the social studies song program to the New England League of Middle Schools last November and has been invited back to this year’s conference. The National Education Association also recently requested information on the program.

“It’s been fun to have people getting on board and believing in the concept,” he said, acknowledging the particular help and feedback he received from Weymouth teachers Pat Cronin, Jennifer Whipple and T.J. Bonner. “I’m very grateful for the help people ended up giving me to benefit as many children as possible.”

The music CD with 12 vocal and 12 instrumental tracks, plus the 60-page lesson packet, are available at moderate cost to anyone who is interested, MacDonald said. By mid-October, all materials should be available at a reduced cost on a single CD-ROM.

For more information, contact MacDonald by email at stevenmac64@aol.com.

Although he taught at South Intermediate School for 10 years and is joining the staff at Abigail Adams this year, MacDonald has spent the past several years teaching in Weymouth primary schools. During that time he has written songs to complement the math program and begun work on songs for science. He plans to develop full curriculum packets for these subjects, as well.

“It’s a wonderful opportunity to reach children in a different way, to educate children in a different way than the traditional textbook method,” MacDonald said. “The hope is that children will retain more information and be more confident in their own intelligence, using music to help.”

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