When it comes to mental health we often forget to allow students opportunities to promote and talk about positive approaches to promote a healthy mind. There are a number of resources from The Resilience Project, Beyond Blue and The Kids Helpline that are students are able to use and equip themselves with the right skills to promote positive mental health.
This lesson focuses on the use of GarageBand to do just that – promote positive mental health. This is achieved by students creating their own sounds and music, for their very own podcast they can share with their peers.
Lesson Objective: Students will be able to promote positive mental health through mindfulness, physical activity, and positive relationships.
App: GarageBand (and Clips)
Overview:
- Using the GarageBand app, students will work in small groups to create backing music and a podcast that promotes positive mental health.
- Students will first brainstorm ideas for sounds and instruments that they can use to create a positive and uplifting atmosphere.
- Students will then use the GarageBand app and Live Loops to record different sounds and instruments and layer them together to create their backing music.
- Students will be encouraged to experiment with different sounds and instruments, and to add in their own recordings of nature sounds or other elements that they feel would contribute to the overall atmosphere of their soundscape.
- They will then record their podcast and use some simple features like ‘automation’ to fade their backing music in and out over their voice. They can use their knowledge from the previous lessons, or this could be an entire literacy focus, depending on how polished you want this.
- Tip when recording – merge soundscapes tracks and mute while recording. You can then use the ‘automation’ feature (link below) to fade in and out the backing music.
- Students will then use Clips to create a cover image for their podcast. They will export their audio podcast from GarageBand and import into Clips.
- They can then present their completed podcast to the class and discuss how they promote positive mental health. The class will reflect on how each sound and instrument made them feel as well as the useful information content shared..
Resources:
How to use Live Loops in GarageBand
Using Automation to manually fade in/out music
GarageBand File below ⬇️
Audio File from GarageBand ⬇️
As always if you would like any help with this or anything else digital technology, please reach out. I’d love to hear how you have used this in your classroom.
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