In preparation for their Peter and the Wolf podcasts, the 1st graders studied the instruments and the characters, listened and drew to the story narrated by Leonard Bernstein, watched the Disney version of the story, assessed their knowledge with Martha’s excellent notebook file for the interactive whiteboard that can be found here, and then produced a podcast of Peter and the Wolf. The podcast served as the assessment tool. For this podcast, the students had to tell me what to narrate (retell the story), they had to choose classroom instruments to perform their assigned characters, and they had to explain why they chose the instrument to represent their characters.

We used GarageBand to create these podcasts. These will probably be our last podcasts as the current GarageBand application for the computer no longer supports podcasts. However, using the book creator app or explain everything classic app, we could do something very similar. Stay tuned!