This website will feature new exercises as addendums to Daphne Athas's Gram-o-Rama (again, our bible). Check back every week for new exercises-- there'll be a new one every Wednesday from today forward. Use them in your classroom, in your home, in the bathtub. Just don't let them know they're being used. No one likes to feel used. Today's exercise is called MELODIZING SOME WORDS:
If you look in your Gram-o-Rama-Manual you’ll find two exercises that deal with music: musicalizing a speech and words to music. In musicalizing a speech one tries to capture the essence of a speech using a musical instrument (often a kazoo, a word-stripping device which leaves words only their tones). In words to music we take pre-written piece of music and write words (traditionally known as lyrics) to accompany that music. The new exercise, melodizing a speech explores the opposite process. We take a pre-written speech, poem, or text and write music to accompany those words. The difference between this and the musicalizing a speech exercise is that we can still hear the words and we’re exploring brand-new music rather than the inherent music in the tones of the words.
And Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening:
Click HERE to hear one of The Utterers performing the first lines of Oh the Places You’ll Go! This exercise can be done with just one person or a number (as in the Robert Frost example). And feel free to go all-out. No instrumentation is required, but all instrumentation is invited.
Thanks! And have a Grammarvelous Day!