Texture
Texture is how we describe the layers of music. How many instruments are playing? Are they all playing the same thing or different things? In pop songs, there are often many layers of vocals, drums, guitars, keyboards, and synths, which makes it a thick texture. A nursery rhyme however has a thin texture, with only one part, the vocal part.
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Below is a unit of work for introducing stage 2 students to the concept of texture. It assumes existing knowledge of pitch and rhythm.
Learning about texture using found instruments and Auxy
Lessons one and two of this unit of work require only some paper and the objects your students can find around them. Lessons three and four require ipads (approximately one for every three or four kids) with the app Auxy loaded on them. Tutorials on how to use this software can be found here. Otherwise, you can simply teach lessons one and two on their own. As always, these resources are now yours to chop and change as you wish. Perhaps you'd like to use the UOW in its entirety, take individual lesson plans, or simply take a couple of ideas to use in your own lessons.
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The four lesson plans can be downloaded as .otd files below. These can be read by any text editing program, such as Microsoft Word or Libre Office.
The unit of work (UOW) is also available below as an .otd or .pdf.