How I turned my class into chart topping singers!

As I have only recently started this blog I wanted to share on of my favourite and most successful ICT projects from last year.

As an avid football fan, I couldn't wait for Euro 2012, along with my class we were waiting in anticipation for it to start. We had done a sportsman's sweepstake which came with a research project about the country they picked. Unfortunately there was little buzz or excitement about England's chances. Ever the optimist I wanted to try and inspire the team travelling to Poland and so decided the only way to do this was for the class to make their own supporters song!

There have been great tracks in the past: three lions, world in motion, we're on the ball?? however nothing for quite a while and we wanted to change that!

As a class we listened to some of the hits of the past and analysed the lyrics making the connections to the game. We spoke about rhythm and rhyme scheme and how songwriting is similar to writing poetry, this added a really good literacy aspect to the project.

Rather than ask the children to create their own music I decided to challenge them to rewrite the lyrics of their favourite chart hits at the time. Once they had decided their song I provided the lyrics for them to rework, to give it a England football twist. The response from the children was fantastic, being so confident with the rhythm of the song helped them with the syllable patterns to write to.

Once the lyrics were finished it was time to get recording! After finding instrumentals to the songs on iTunes the children used the program Audacity to record themselves singing their new tunes. This was the fun part, the children thoroughly enjoyed recording themselves, working in a team to complete the track and couldn't wait to share their finished efforts.

Once the songs were completed, the children then had to market their songs. They made music videos using Microsoft Movie Maker, they had to do mock interviews advertising the song and they wrote persuasive adverts. Once the videos were completed they were uploaded to YouTube with the children set a task to try and get the most views by the end of the tournament. Every day they wanted a count to see who was winning and were pestering family members and friends to watch and share. Overall it was a very successful project that combined so many different aspects of the curriculum but provided the children with a long lasting keepsake. Whenever England play in a tournament they will always remember the pop song they made.

The Manchester Evening News even featured the songs in the paper and website, you can view it here.

Here are the songs/videos the children made, the videos were made by the children:


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