Original compositions spur students to write Delphi Elementary students helped musician and educator Randy Beard lead audience members to sing original compositions as teaching tools during a two-day workshop. Students used their own words from journals set to music to understand how the words could become lyrics in songs. Comet photo by Debbie Lowe Rock and folk music filled the halls Oct. 6 through 9 at Delphi Community Elementary School and Camden Childhood Education Center when educator, musician and writer Randy Beard presented “Lyrical Literacy” for students in kindergarten to fifth grade. Beard hosted 45- minute classes filled with interactive impromptu musical compositions. Beard put the music to lyrics provided by the students in journal form. As the students held up a story for Beard to read, he composed the music to fit the words.

Song titles from Delphi third-graders’ original compositions included “My Best Friend,” “Mud Puddle,” “Do They Have Leaves in California?” and “My Teacher is Strict, But Nice.”

“It’s not because of ‘me’, but because of ‘we’,” Beard told one set of students Thursday. “We are creating something that exists nowhere else but right in this place.”

According to Delphi Elementary principal Joe Brown, all students spend an hour each day in ‘writing workshop’ where student writing notebooks are developed. He said the workshop was made possible with contributions from the Delphi Fine Arts Council, MOP Squad, Tippecanoe Arts Federation, Indiana Arts Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts

“The goal of the two-day program is to promote students’ writing and to make it fun,” Brown said. “This program could inspire students to be creative writers.”

Beard, who will be delivering the keynote address at the Indiana State Reading Association Annual Conference in March, said students many times put concerns they have about their life events into what they write for the program. He explained he is then able to express a possible course of action for them through lyrics in the form of singing his solution of what he would do if he was bothered by a similar problem.

“I followed my heart with this job,” Beard said. “I don’t let business cloud my decisions about how to conduct the workshops.”

Beard is a former sixthgrade teacher who developed the creative writing activity for children while student teaching at Indiana University and is an educational consultant. He graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Elementary Education from Indiana University.

“When I put music to a child’s words, eyes light up,” he said. “This is a wonderful way to encourage writing and reading while building a child’s confidence.”