Sibelius continues to offer software titles designed with educators in mind. The "Groovy" series, starts with Groovy Shapes and is targeted at 5-11 year olds. Organized into two main sections, Groovy offers guided instruction in the "Explore" module and then encourages students to apply what they've learned in the "Create" section.
In the Explore section, children are guided aurally through a series of progressive musical exercises and games, which teaches them how music works. In the Create section, children can put into practice what they've learned by creating their own music.
"Shapes" is the first of three in the "Groovy" series, and the shapes represent elements of music like rhythm, melody and chords. Children simply drag these onto the screen to build up their creation. Then they can play back their piece, edit it, or even see the elements displayed as musical notation.
For traditional music teachers, it can be a bit disconcerting at first, but once you realize that you have the option of working with standard notation, I think you will be won over to the program's fun and creativity oriented learning architecture - having students create music is one of the more motivating ways of engaging students in learning music.
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