IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

This week, we have been talking a lot about patterns and how they may connect to sound and listening. We have been practicing creating patterns in many ways, including creating them with our bodies. Our friends love trying out other friends’ body patterns. It feels like dancing!

This morning  friends were presented with several patterns that I had drawn. A simple ABAB pattern, an AABB pattern, and a few others. After talking about characteristics of patterns, I then posed the question to them, “How can you incorporate this with sound?”

Almost immediately, Makenzi mentioned that she had been playing the piano in the big studio with Mrs. Grotjan and had followed along with something that looked like a pattern that told her what notes to play. That gave us the idea that we could create music to these patterns!

We tried singing high pitches and low pitches to the ABAB pattern. Then we tried with some of the other patterns. When a new pattern gave us a third option, one friend suggested clapping instead of singing for that portion. This then inspired us to create our own song patterns. We had so much fun creating and sharing them!

Tags: music, patterns, project, sound

We had a mini field trip today to the audiology center! We are lucky enough to have it housed in our building. Miss Sally, our district audiologist, gave us a tour of the center and the soundproof hearing screening room. Miss Sally was impressed with our knowledge about the parts of the ear and taught us a little bit about a tool called a Timpometer. This tool measures our ear drums’ activity. She let each friend have a try. It was very cool to watch the computer show how our ear drums reacted to the vibration. Miss Sally also taught us about hearing aids and how they work. We learned that if we had trouble hearing, we could use a tool called a hearing aid to help us. We got to try out the aids and see how they amplified the sound for us. Such a neat day!

Tags: curious, field trip, project, sound

Today our class made pan pipes. We created these by lining up 8 different sizes of cut straws longest to shortest. Then we taped the straw pieces together and blew away! We had some conversations about how the sound waves traveled through the different straws and what that meant for pitch. Earlier this morning, a friend had created an instrument that changed pitch. We learned that the less rubber band space the instrument had, the higher the pitch. The more space the sound waves had to travel, the lower the pitch. We were interested to see if this was true for the panpipes- and it was! See if your learner can play different pitches for you.

Tags: listening, music, project, sound

This week, we are looking a little bit deeper into the human ear. Today, we did observational drawings of the ear. We learned that there is an inner ear and outer ear and hope to learn more about the eardrum later this week.

Tags: curious, observation, project, sound

On Friday, Dylan and Jackson were experimenting more with the cup phones. Dylan invited Ayden over to join them. He inserted one of the phones inside the other, creating a 3 way connection. The boys tried it out and were excited to discover that they could hear one another! They invited another friend, and another, to continue adding connections. Pretty soon, about half the class was involved with the multi way connection phone. They troubleshooted and problem solved together when connections were lost and broken and celebrated when they could hear one another or each other’s vibrations on the string.

Tags: collaboration, inspiration, project, sound