VIDEO: Grammy nominated songwriter inspires White Rock Elementary student creations
Video and story by Michelle Broskie and Sydney Northcutt, FCUSD Communication Internship Program
The fourth and fifth graders of White Rock Elementary School might just be the next Grammy award recipients for their song “Super Cool School.”
Songwriter Steve Seskin visited White Rock recently to create a song with the students focusing on a positive anti-bullying message and performed it to the school. Seskin has visited twice, reaching a large audience with his performances and including a large portion of the student body in his songwriting process.
Seskin is a Grammy nominated songwriter who has worked with artists such as Kenny Chesney and Tim McGraw. Now he spends his time traveling to different schools in Northern California to share his songwriting program and anti-bullying and positive school culture messages with students. He is most famous for the song “Don’t Laugh at Me” written through his program with students.
VIDEO: Watch Seskin and the students work together to create a positive message in this video.
At White Rock he started off the day by creating lyrics with the fourth and fifth grade students.
The students were at the center of this creative process, coming up with all the lyrics themselves. Brianna Strang’s fifth grade class wrote the second verse of the song.
“He takes a lot of the input from the kids themselves so they feel like they wrote it and they get to take ownership of the song they created,” Strang said.
Songwriting is a great tool for creative thinking as well as academic improvement. “We wanted him to work with the students, and help them work with language and singing and a positive message,” said Principal Sandy Spaulding. Students often had the challenge of making the lyrics rhyme and finding the right words to fit with their verses.
Seskin visited during the District’s Cool2BKind week, echoing the message of positive school culture and anti-bullying. “Anti-bullying is important to me because I think schools are the best they can be when kids are being kind to one another and respectful to each other. . .” he said.
The students were able to easily recognize the purpose of the song they created within the anti-bullying campaign.
“We could use the song to make all those examples happen in their schools so all the schools in the United States can be a ‘Cool School,’” said fifth-grader Josiah Peterson, whose suggestion for song title was voted the winner.