HOPE—The last time we checked in with teen singer songwriters Clio Berta and Chloe Isis was two years ago. In a “Hail To The Rad Kids” series, they performed that cup slamming song “You’re Gonna Miss Me” that became instantly popular months later on the radio. (See our original story on these two here.)

Two years later, they’re still writing songs and singing together. This summer, however, they decided to teach kids 8-11 their process. Through Sweet Tree Arts, the girls took three days off from their busy work schedules to run a workshop called Mix Media Madness.

“We wanted an excuse to hang out together, but also, we wanted to do something for kids that we both like to do,” said Clio.

The workshop was informally conceived and intuitively executed. Basically, the girls introduced to the 11 students the way they like to creatively imagine songs and teach their own process. From July 20-22, they would play songs for the kids and ask them to “draw” what they heard as well as encourage them to create lyrics from their own poetry.

“We went over the anatomy of what goes into a song,” said Chloe. “We had them listen to music and then we had them work out the standard format of a song.”

“We just broke it down to verse, chorus, verse, chorus verse— which is the base of a song,” said Clio.

“We had to introduce the terms.” added Chloe. “What is a verse and a chorus and how do you identify which one is which?”

The girls used a variety of teaching tools because, as they observed, some kids went blank when asked to create poetry or lyrics. They needed other ways to draw from inspiration. For instance, they had the kids draw and cut out shapes after listening to a song, which Chloe and Clio then turned the art pieces into cyanotypes — a photographic printing process that produces a cyan-blue print.

“Rather than teaching them a certain way to write music, we just showed them how we personally go about it and it opened up ways to experiment with,” said Chloe.

Some of the drawings show the kids’ innate understanding of the structure, starting with their auditory perception. One drawing reads “Drums, Peano, her voys, Floot, huming, gutur.” (Assuming spelling will be the next skill to master with lyrics, this is pretty great!)

Now that the workshop is over, Chloe is back at her gardening job and Clio is back splitting her time between the Montessori School summer camp and Jo Ellen Designs. The duo still finds time to singing together and recently performed in a recording session, where they had to learn Greek in order to sing the lyrics.

Never a dull moment, these two.

Kay Stephens can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com