Okay – first of all, if you’ve never heard of Chrome Music Lab – you need to check it out!  It has tons of FREE tools that are great to use for various things in your classroom, even if it’s just for a “fun” day.

Here is one SUPER fun activity that you can do with just about any grade. Sign-up for our newsletter to get quick access to the song cards!

Song Maker in Chrome Music Lab

Possibly my favorite tool in Chrome Music Lab is the Song Maker.  My class and I were exploring the tools of the lab and we discovered that the colors used in Song Maker match the colors of the Boomwhackers!  So we decided – let’s make a song and PLAY it!  We started out with something simple (Twinkle Twinkle Little Star)

As it plays back it gives you a bar to follow along, just pass out Boomwhackers and push play – so easy!  All you need is a projector and Boomwhackers!  Then I had students start calling out “requests”.  I told them it had to be simple – but through doing this I ended up discovering you can change the time signature, length of the song, and a bunch more! 

Adjust Song Maker Settings

If you click on settings in the bottom right corner: 

It brings up this window which lets you adjust the length of the song, beats per bar, beat division, scale, starting pitch, and range displayed.

Download Premade Song Cards with Direct Links to Pre-Made Songs

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Next Step

After I made some of their requests, I had students come up and create songs at the screen.  They had TOO much fun doing this – of course some tried to recreate their favorite song we’d just played, some just filled in ALL the boxes so it was PURE chaos, and some tried to write a fun melody.  It was truly great to see them enjoying writing and discovering music as a class!

What Grade Levels?

I found that this activity works well for a VAST age range.  I was genuinely surprised by how much fun my middle school students had doing this activity.  We don’t do a ton of instrument playing at that age so they found it to be fun to work together as a class and play the song.  I had my 2nd graders give it a go – and they did well also!  My kindergartners enjoyed figuring out the songs, and we played songs VERY slowly.   I still think they had fun and it was a valuable teaching experience but it was definitely harder for them.  Keep that in mind for your classroom!

That’s all for today! Thanks for reading and I hope you have fun with this activity!