Abiyoyo - Read and Play Along
One of my absolute favorite assignments from this course, was when we were asked to read along to a short story using an audio recording technology of some kind. As a music teacher, I jumped on the chance to be able to do a musical story that I would actually want to do with my own students. I have attached the audio of my reading (and singing, and ukulele playing!) at the bottom of this blog post for your listening pleasure!
The Planning and Purpose
I decided to read Abiyoyo, a book I had purchased with the intention of reading it with my younger students when I introduced the ukulele to them. Before the coronavirus, our plans revolved around our curriculum plan, and for K-2 graders, we were going to start and continue the study of instrument families. I love to bring in real life examples when possible, to allow the kids to touch it, feel it, and hear it in real life. I hadn’t played uke for my students before, but another music teacher on my team uses it constantly, and the kids always love to be able to hear it and sing along to it.
I thought it would be the perfect chance to record myself reading a story, allowing the students to hear the ukulele and hear the story. Something I could upload to Google Classroom and get the students involved in learning and music from home! This keeps my students on track in a way with their curriculum plan, letting them experience hearing a live instrument with the story similarly to how we would have done it in class.
Hardware and the How-To’s
I felt very fortunate to have the laptop that I do while making this audio recording. Several months ago, I decided to purchase my dream laptop, the 16” MacBook Pro. I even splurged and got the 8-core processor, 4GB VRAM, and 1 TB SSD. This thing is incredible! One of the best features (in my opinion, at least) of this laptop is the built-in microphones. This allowed me to simply go to the Voice Memos application and simply record the story. The editing features are incredibly easy. If you want to re-record something, you simply click where you want to start, click record, and you’re re-recording over the old audio. In my case, I mispronounced a word. I didn’t want to end the recording there and start from scratch, so I simply selected the pause in audio between pages, and re-did one page of reading in the recording.
Part of the reason I love working for Apple is that I fell in love with the simplicity and ease of their products, both hardware and software. A computer should work in the way you expect it, without having to put much thought into it. I was never formally trained on the voice memo application, I didn’t even know the re-record was a feature. I simply had the intuition to click the spot and the record button, and it did what I thought it would do.
Important Stuff
Abiyoyo is a book, written by Pete Seeger. It is technically considered a “Storysong” with recommended music written in the front, throughout, and back of the book to be played for students and children on a ukulele. The song itself is well within the public domain. The story is the full intellectual property of Pete Seeger.