Legendary Beatboxer Doug E Fresh
ALL ABOUT BEATBOXING!
Today in music class students really enjoyed learning about beatboxing! For a brief history lesson, I'd like to quote an excerpt from www.MercuryNews.com:
"On the hip-hop scene, "beatboxing"--the term for the art of creating rhythms and sound effects with the human voice--has taken a back seat to rapping, DJing, emceeing, break dancing and graffiti art since it surfaced in the 80s".
The article continues on to explain how beatboxing rose beyond it's "backseat" to become a primary musical art form, and outlines elements of beatboxing technique and history! Beatboxing isn't just a fascinating and culturally relevant part of music history and hip hop culture.
From an educational perspective, it is also an incredible art form that teaches rhythm, oral skills and patterning! I used this opportunity to talk about letter sounds and vocabulary words with children, as well as compound phonemes such as "ch" at "ts" with our school age class.
Younger students also used fruit and vegetable shakers to play rhythms with the electronic beats from my keyboard, as well as movement songs!
To help illustrate beatbox and rhythm concepts, I used the wonderful and educational children's show from PBS, "The Electric Company".
I also showed this amazing flute beatboxing video from Greg Patillo--who is incredibly talented and shown here arranging a common favorite musical tune for many of our students--the Super Mario Brothers theme! :)