Learning the musical alphabet with Music Blocks

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MAPFLC teaching artist Huanhuan Xie, student of Carole Haber at New England Conservatory, recently led a very nice lesson that I would like to share with you!

Word games with the musical alphabet

The concept is simple: use the musical alphabet (a.k.a. alphabet notation) to spell words (in English).

To start, Huanhuan came up with a few words to demonstrate the idea. For example, two of the words she had were “egg” and “bag.” Both of these words work, because they can be spelled only using letters in the musical alphabet, which are A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. “Chef” is an example of a word that cannot be spelled with the musical alphabet because of the “H.”

“Dad” is “Re,” “La,” “Re” in solfege.
Because there is no “H,” a word like “Chef” cannot be spelled in the musical alphabet.
Screenshots of code created by students during the lesson.

Student brainstorming

Huanhuan drew on a whiteboard the musical alphabet with solfege below it. This same activity could be done without introducing solfege, by only using letters. Huanhuan’s goal, however, was to familiarize the students with solfege, so she steered the activity in a way that helped familiarize students with solfege.

The class during the brainstorm session. MAP Family Learning Center teaching artist Huanhuan at right.
Musical alphabet above with corresponding solfege below

Next, we had students use paper and pencil to write down a list of words that could be created with the musical alphabet. We brainstormed as a group at first to get warmed up, but students quickly got the hang if it and, before we knew it, the students had come up with some very good lists.

Inputting the words into Music Blocks

After the students had their list written down, they began putting the words into Music Blocks. They pulled out musical alphabet note blocks from the palette and selected the letters corresponding with the words on their list. This group of mostly second grade students had to find the correct letters and order them to make the words. They were also asked to put the stack of notes into an Action block, which would allow them to give the melodic snippet a meaningful name and allow them to make copies for use and reuse within a larger structure.

Next steps

Students didn’t have much time within the hour to order and reorder their created Action blocks, which would have been interesting. For example, one could ask, “What does ‘egg,’ ‘dad,’ ‘fed’ sound like as opposed to ‘dad,’ ‘egg,’ ‘fed’?” The results would probably be interesting, and some might be inspiration for a musical composition.

Sample projects

Below are sample projects by students and teachers.

Your turn!

Now that you’ve read about how to explore the musical alphabet with Music Blocks, we encourage you to try the same this in your own class. If you have feedback or questions, you can drop it in the comment box below or send a message.