A Musical Passport to Kindness

• Megan McKee
• Posted 4/11/22
• 2 comments

I’m taking my students on a trip to seven different continents without them ever having to leave their classroom! Students are learning about children from all around the world as well as the music, instruments, art, dances, cuisine, customs, fashion, climate, and terrain of faraway locations.

To reinforce the concept of kindness and respect throughout our travels, I select a different student each day to be our Kindness Counts Kid. To celebrate this student, their classmates and I share kind comments about them. I then type out and print the comments for the child for them to keep and share with their families. By the end of the year, my goal is for every child to have the opportunity to be a Kindness Counts Kid.

Our Adventure Begins

As an elementary music teacher, I believe it is my responsibility to help my students become kind human beings who respect and appreciate the world we live in. I use music as the vehicle to accomplish this goal by having students earn stamps for their musical passports.

At the start of the unit, we learn the songs “What a Wonderful World” by Louis Armstrong and “The Seven Continents Song” by Hopscotch to link activities together. I remind students to be considerate passengers on our excursions. To add excitement and remember each place we visit, each student gets their own “passport” wherein they will give themselves a “passport stamp” by drawing an instrument, animal, or symbol they learned from the lesson.

As much as possible, I like to incorporate hand-on elements in my lessons. To entice students into our next adventure, I spin the globe in my room to show them our next destination. In addition, I have acquired an accordion, two steel pans, a gathering drum, a Tibetan singing bowl, twenty two ukuleles, and a harmonica. My plan is to continue building my collection of world instruments to spark my students’ interest.

Sometimes I will coordinate one of our visits to a celebration or certain time of the year. Around Saint Patrick’s Day, we will travel to Ireland and learn about penny whistles. In the fall I collaborate with our amazing elementary art teacher in teaching our students about some of the art and music from Mexico relating to Día de Muertos.

We live in rural Appalachia, so in addition to learning about the music and cultures worldwide, we also spend time learning about our music and culture in Southern Ohio. After listening to our regional music, I teach my students to play the spoons. We use plastic spoons rubber-banded together.

I also frequently share songs from the organization Playing for Change. This group has a variety of recordings featuring people of all ages singing and playing instruments across the globe. While listening to music from around the world, I stress the importance of respecting the cultures and traditions that are different from our own.

Extending our Adventure

To extend our adventures and reinforce the importance of kindness, respect, and appreciation, I add lessons about caring for our environment.

In April, right around Earth Day, I invite representatives of our local recycling center outreach program to join me in the classroom as we use recycled and repurposed items to experiment with and make musical instruments. My students then create music with their instruments and work with their classmates in clusters.

During this unit, we discuss steps that we all can take to help reduce, reuse, and recycle. We talk about how recycling impacts our world and how other people around the world make instruments from everyday items, such as the spoons we learn about from our lessons on Appalachian music.

Kindness Counts Kids

In my personal experience, it never gets old hearing nice things said about oneself. I have added the Kindness Counts Kids element into my classroom because I want each of my students to experience this! Writing up the kind things students share about each other takes time, but it is a beautiful learning experience for students to find something nice to say about their classmates.

Conclusion

I want my students to use their brilliant creativity to scatter and spread kindness to even their most challenging classmates. I want to teach my students how showing kindness to others and taking care of our world impacts not just them directly but others all around the world. Kindness is what truly makes the world a better place.