I had gone to a workshop last year at the Appleton PAC with Stuart Stotts about Arts Integration and writing song lyrics in the classroom. It was a two day work shop and over the course of two days I was introduced to the arts integration philosophy as well as ways to teach and implement lyric writing in the classroom as a means of demonstrating understanding concepts and using music to do so. I fell in LOVE with it and immediately tried it in my previous district last year. It was tough the first go around, but this time I was lucky to have some help in finding a content area to focus on. My colleague, a second grade teacher, Miranda Zygiel, and I discussed how to use the lyric writing as a means of demonstrating understanding of fables, which her class was working on as a part of the common core literacy curriculum. She gave me groups of kids to work together, I worked through the process of teaching lyric writing with rhyme structure and meter in poetry and got to work helping the students organize ideas. They chose a fable from a list of fables they had been working on, organized details from the beginning, middle, and end of the fable as well as the message, and then chose from the beginning, middle, and end one detail that seemed most important in relaying the meaning of the story to the "audience". We used Stuart Stotts' song, "How Do I Know? I Read it In A Book" as the foundation to our lyrics and wrote verses using his rhyme scheme and meter of syllables in each line of the verses. Miranda then had a fabulous idea to use the song in creating a music video using our green screen app, DoInk. She gave up her prep time to join our music class and helped students choose green screen photos for their fable, as well as helped to organize the groups, and shoot the video. We then met later together in the day and put the finishing touches on the video and send it to YouTube. Below is the final project, which the kids decided to name Fable Rock: Please enjoy!

My third graders have finished their personal learning projects on the orchestra and composers. Just a recap from the beginning: we started first getting used to the technology and resources on our iPads through Schoology, then students were given goal sheets to help them stay on task with what they wanted to learn about during each music class. Students were also given sample learning targets to choose from to help them create a goal for themselves. As time went on, students were asked to choose one area of study to focus on for a project, using instrument(s) from the orchestra or choosing a composer from the list to study (Amy Beach, Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn, Mozart, William Grant Still, Scott Joplin). They were able to work either independently or in a small group, and they were able to choose the medium in which to present their information as long as they met the proficiency requirements in the rubric (which I conferenced with them individually on to help ensure understanding of expectations and vital information to include). Finally, students got to work and after about 2.5 months (much of which by the way was trial and error and trial again on my part) we finally completed it. Below I have provided some of the final projects that were created with a digital medium. Many were very creative!

Above is a page from a student's work using explain everything to demonstrate knowledge and understanding about the Tuba! 

I was thoroughly impressed with the work of my students and I will definitely continue to use this unit in years to come, but obviously with changes to meet the learning that my future students would like to accomplish. I hope that this provided a little more concrete evidence of how awesome personalized learning can be and how meaningful it can be for students!