Book Creator, Kindergartners, and Soundtrap = Making an ebook Come to Life!
I have written many times about how great Book Creator is in the elementary music classroom. I am a certified educator of Book Creator and have been using it since 2014. This week, my kindergartners and I used Book Creator and Soundtrap to make a book come to life.
Book Creator
Book Creator is a web-based app that gives your students the opportunity to create ebooks using traditional and digital methods. In this case, we read the story by Cronin and Lewin, Click, Clack, Boo! This popular story is about how Farmer Brown does not like Halloween and tried to sleep through the evening so he does not have to listen to the sounds and see the Jack-o’-Lanterns. However, the barn animals have a different idea and decide to throw a party in the barn.
Throughout the book, there are consistent sounds that are repeated many times: creak, tap, crunch, and quack. The students first listened to the story and spoke about what they comprehended from the plot of the book. Then, they drew pictures from the book. We took the pictures, photographed them, and added them to Book Creator using the template for a photo album.
Soundtrap
Once they illustrated the ebook, they used the instruments found in their instrument kits to create sound effects for the words: creak, tap, crunch, and quack. Their kits consist of small xylophones, egg shakers, sticks, scarves, bells, and a bean bag. Most of the students decided to use the xylophones for creak, the sticks for tap, the egg shakers for crunch, and their voices and bells for quack. I used Soundtrap to record and mix their sound effects. I downloaded it as .wav files and uploaded them to Book Creator to play on the pages where the words appeared. Book Creator creates an audio icon to playback the sound effects when you read the book, or have the book read to you.
Final Product
The final product was excellent. I am so proud of the kindergartners! We published it through a private link in Book Creator because you can publish your works and share them via a link. Since this book is copyrighted, we published it privately so the students could see the final product in their music classes and we could share that with their classroom teachers.
Book Creator is free for 40 ebooks and Soundtrap, if you the teacher is using it by yourself and not having the students access it, then you can use the free version. If you would like to use Soundtrap with your students, there is a paid EDU subscription which I use with my students in grades 2 through 5. It is very intuitive to use and they love creating and recording original music with it.
What can your students create with these tools in your music classroom?