In our music lesson teaching our class about the basics of the West African drum the djembe we brought the first peoples’ principle (FPPL) Learning is embedded in memory, history, and story into the classroom. We used this principle because of the goal of our class is a social studies lesson as well as a musical one. Throughout the entirety of the intro to the lesson, we gave the children an in-depth historical lecture about the origins of the drum and what the drum was meant for back when it was first brought into West African culture. We also talked about how each drum was unique to the owner as the wooden portion of the drum represents its connection to the family. The wood would be telling the family tree story of the owner connecting the youth (fruit and leaves) and the ancestors (the roots underground). From this incorporation of the FPPL our goal was to not only introduce some new and interesting information to our class but to also show them how important it is to remember that musical instruments are so different all around the world and that it is important that before we chose to want to experiment and play with them, we must respect the historical content of the instruments. 

The process of creating this music plan was pretty seamless. We begun by choosing the subject we wished to interrogate into our lesson which Sam and I just picked the social sciences more specifically social studies, we chose this subject because we didn’t want to double up on any subjects. From there it was Maddy who thought of the great idea of drumming and found the video that would be the base of our assignment. We split the work up by looking at all the music lesson plan sections and splitting them off according to how much work each required. I got to make up the physical lesson plan and teaching cues; which I was more than happy to do because it makes me comfortable knowing exactly what is going on. The actual lesson I thought was quite successful, again we all just split up the parts of the lesson and made sure everyone would get a chance to talk and we decided that if anyone had any extra opportunities or felt that someone else needed assistance in their portion we would just chip in with comments. It was my job to teach the warm-up lesson, which went smooth after watching the video, I felt that I had a great voice and teaching cues which the class all listened to me, the class was also engaged and non-disruptive throughout all my teaching. I hope that the class enjoyed the lesson as much as it seemed like in person and I hope they all felt that they got to not only have fun but also learn something they didn’t know before.