Since the beginning of the year, my Lincoln Elementary students and I have met two times to work on the podcast I talked about starting on the first of January. One of our classes was cancelled due to the snowy, icy winter weather we are experiencing in Indiana. It has been a bit of a challenge to move forward with our podcast, but we’re still making progress!

I have a total of 15 High Ability students grades 2-5, who were recommended to me by our principal. We are currently meeting once a week in the music room for 30 minutes. This is the only time during the week available due to my schedule and the classroom teacher’s schedules.

For our first meeting, I explained what a podcast is. We listened to several podcasts for children and some produced by school children. One of my favorite school podcasts is produced by Willowdale Elementary School in Omaha, Nebraska. They call their podcast Radio Willow Web. We are going to model our podcast after theirs to start with. Willow Web podcasts run about 8-10 minutes which is plenty long for an elementary podcast. This week during our second podcast meeting, the children voted on a name for our podcast and picked the name “What’s Up Lincoln?”.

We listened to several possible songs for the podcast. I am the composer of the songs that were played for the students, so we could avoid any copyright issues with the music. After listening through the songs, each student wrote down their favorite and we tallied the votes. The song “Curiosity” was picked for our first podcast as it is one of eighteen songs from my children’s CD “Blueprints for Life” that I often use in class.

Next I handed out a list of tongue twisters and let each child pick out their favorite one from the list. The children practiced their lines several times then each child took a turn recording their tongue twister. For about half of the children it was the first time they had experienced recording their voice and hearing only their voice.  It was fun to watch them learn that when speaking in a microphone, one must speak slowly and clearly, with feeling!

Our first podcast topic will be tongue twisters and where they originated. This should be a fun and easy topic for our first show. Next week we will decide on which tongue twisters to use, who will be the host or hosts, and what other details that will need to be taken care of beforehand. Radio Willow Web has an excellent handbook at their website that outlines what is needed to produce a podcast by Tony Vincent. This is a very helpful tool!

Our school’s technology specialist is going to help me with producing, editing and posting our podcast – What’s Up Lincoln!  This is an exciting journey for both me and my students. When our first podcast airs, I’ll give another update so you can hear how it went!

“We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”

-Walt Disney