A Day In My Life with Henry H. Houston School

Our year-long residency at Henry H. Houston School combined poetry writing, songwriting, music production and performance in a cross-curricular residency that involved the whole school.

Led by LiveConnections Founding Director David Bradley and teaching artist Andrew Lipke (a Philadelphia-based composer, performer and producer), together with Houston Music Specialist Teacher Ezechial Thurman, the project resulted in an album of 16 original songs and a 44-page book of student poems, as well as a music video for one of the songs.

Students had the opportunity to perform at the Pennsylvania State Capitol (where they were honored on the House floor), Philadelphia City Council and the Barnes Foundation. The project involved more than a dozen guest artists who collaborated with the students.

Songs grew from writing across the grades, all-school assemblies (“It All Starts Now”), a cross-city collaboration with Andrew Jackson Elementary School (“Similarities”), an exchange between an adult rapper and student rapper (“Dear Future Me”) and the artists’ responses to student work (“Write You a Letter”; “Dear Future Me”).

The residency featured:

• Kick-off assemblies with the entire student body, during which the lead-off song on the album was created and recorded.
• Three-week writing intensive in the fall led by poet Jacob Winterstein (a Houston School alum), featuring 2-3 visits to every class in the school, grades K-8. This writing focused on the theme of “A Day in My Life,” and ideas of home, family and neighborhood.
• The formation of “Lyrical Productions,” a 35-student core group of 4th-8th graders, who worked regularly from November to June to create and record the songs for the album. Sessions with this group (60-90 minutes) were led by Andrew Lipke and David Bradley and focused on individual and collaborative lyric writing, concepts of composition, singing and recording.
• A winter poetry intensive led by Jacob, featuring 8 sessions with a 5th grade and 8th grade class. These workshops grew from the desire to help students go deeper with their writing and have more time for writing and revision. The poems students wrote formed the content of the poetry book and several were included on the album as spoken word poems or song lyrics. In addition to this intensive, a writing project with 4th and 6th grades focusing on “letters to one not here” (people no longer in the students’ lives) inspired the song “Write You a Letter.”
• Field trips to the National Constitution Center (which inspired “One Life Taken, One Life Saved”), World Cafe Live (where they created “Dance Like No One’s Watching”) and two professional recording studios, as well as the performance sites noted above.
• A Community Recording Day at World Cafe Live, in which a dozen professionals from business, civic and arts field joined the core group to record a song, and then have a dialogue with students about their jobs and career paths.
• The creation of a music video for the song “Turn Up!,” which involved students working with movement artist Lela Aisha Jones to develop choreography, then working with videographer Galea McGregor to shoot the video around the school. The video included the whole student body, which learned choreography created by the students with the help of Ms. Jones.
• The creation of a short documentary feature about the project, featuring interviews with key program staff and students as well as footage from the creative process throughout the year.

Through this residency, we set out to integrate writing and music-making in a way that impacted the learning of the school. We also aimed to build collaborative skills among students, by having them write and create music in groups, and by forming a core group that spanned 4th-8th grades, so that students who normally would not work together could do so.

Music specialist teacher Ezechial Thurman referred to the project as “musical mentoring,” saying: “We believe that our partnership with LiveConnections has been and will continue to be a catalyst for unlocking a new level of learning at Houston School. As our CD recording project targets creative writing partnered with song-writing and music composition, Houston students are discovering a deeper level of motivation and experiencing a project-based approach to learning. The resulting songs and videos will also have a mentoring effect on the entire school, community and beyond, helping students imagine a bridge into a positive future, where they envision themselves as adults making an impact in Philadelphia. LiveConnections has consistently exceeded our expectations in serving the students of Houston School.”