Pupils in P5 at St John’s Primary, South Ayrshire, recently challenged Radio Lingua Schools to support them in a project on the human body. The class had been learning about the parts of the human body including the functions of bones, muscles, organs and the skin, and their class teacher wanted to reinforce their learning with a project which would involve various elements of media.

The first stage was to write a song: using GarageBand loops and a midi keyboard, the children created a rhythm and melody, and started to write the words to the song, working along with Radio Lingua Schools director Mark Pentleton. The pupils then spent a few days creating sponge versions of bodily organs. The class teacher wanted the pupils to understand how the parts of the body fit together, so we came up with an idea which would combine the song with a visual element involving time-lapse photography. The pupils were delighted with the result which exemplifies a real cross-curricular project.

Sing along to the Body Song with the lyrics below:

We’ve been learning about our bodies, all about our skeleton:
Bones and organs, flesh and muscles, let’s all sing our body song.

When you’re walking around or running a race
Your bones help you move all over the place.
You’d be very floppy all of the time
If you didn’t have a strong, straight spine.
Your ankle helps you walk, your wrist helps you write;
Your patella helps you kneel and your jaw helps you bite.
So without your bones you couldn’t do much,
And that’s all you need to know.

Every day of your life you are kept alive:
Without your organs you just couldn’t survive.
It’s complicated, so let us explain:
Your eyes send pictures to your brain.
Your heart pumps your blood, which makes you feel good.
Your intestines help you digest all of your food.
So without your organs you couldn’t do much,
And that’s all you need to know.

If you stretch or you jump, or even dance with your friend,
Your muscles help you move, they help you to bend.
You have 600 muscles in your body machine:
to smile you need to use seventeen.
Last but not least comes your skin,
Protecting everything and keeping everything in!
So your body’s made up of all these things,
And that’s all you need to know.

In the early stages of learning a language, learners have a limited range of vocabulary and it’s often difficult to find interesting and motivating ways to practise the few words and phrases they have learned. This was exactly the experience of teachers in St Mark’s, Irvine, and Radio Lingua Schools designed a workshop around providing an additional mode of practice for a group of primary 6 pupils who had just started learning Spanish.

The pupils participating in the workshop only had three Spanish lessons prior to taking part, but in this time they had managed to cover greetings, asking each other ¿cómo te llamas? (what is your name?) and dealing with ages. The workshop aimed to provide an additional opportunity to practise key words and phrases at this early stage of learning.

The first stage of the workshop involved the pupils working with Garageband on a file which included the various parts of a conversation, muddled up. This file had been prepared prior to the workshop, simply recording two voices on two different tracks of Garageband. The same process can easily be achieved in Audacity or other audio editors.

The pupils had to rearrange the recorded ‘regions’ on separate tracks of the Garageband file, making up a conversation between “Carlos” and “Isabel”. The pupils understood the words and phrases contained in the conversation immediately, so rearranging the phrases to make the correct conversation was a straightforward task.

Having completely rearranged the conversation, each pair played their audio file to the rest of the group. They then had to record their own version of the conversation, taking on the roles of “Carlos” and “Isabel” themselves and using the Vocal Transformer plugin in Garageband to make one voice in each group sound a bit more masculine!

The podcasts recorded by each pair can be found below. Just a reminder that in each case one of the voices has a Vocal Transformer filter applied!

Group 1

Group 2

Group 3

This workshop will feature in a forthcoming episode of the Apple Distinguished Educator Learning Series, The Creative Classroom, which will feature ideas and tips for using iLife and iWork in the classroom. More information will be made available in the coming weeks.