Changing One's Tune: A Music Therapy STEM Integrated Project
A music therapy STEM integrated project combines science and language arts. Pupils listen to music, learn about music physics, build and play instruments, write songs, and share their musical creations. They study different intervals and categorize them as consonant or dissonant, learn about tension, release, and harmonic analysis, and then create harmonic progressions that correspond to different emotions. Scholars move on to explore the relationship between music and the mind and describe music's power as a positive tool for mental well-being. They create a deck of advice cards for dealing with fears and anxiety, analyze Greek tragedies selecting one that relates to their own personal anxiety, and recreate a scene from that play. After identifying and analyzing musical, poetic devices, scholars create their own musical poems. The unit ends with pupils writing a proposal requesting a music therapy space where peers can find catharsis.