It’s a frustrating thing the day you realize that your Grade 4 students are still confusing beat and rhythm, and that they don’t read rhythms quite as well as you imagined they should. I dare say—and feel free to challenge
Developing New Units: Kindergarten
As I wrote in this post… A while back, our school put the entire How We Express Ourselves theme into the hands of the Arts teachers. In a lot of ways, this was a fantastic idea. (And in just as
Inquiry: Musical Cycles
Following a previous post, someone asked about our inquiry into cycles. The main inquiry point is that the layering and varying of simple musical patterns can create a complex sound, and that this cycling technique is used in several musical
Developing New Units (PreK)
Once in a while I try to clean up my computer—call it “spring cleaning,” I guess—and this time around I’ve stumbled upon loads of interesting things that I’d mostly forgotten about. As I clean up, I’ll be rolling out the
Expression and the Elements of Music
In Grade 2, I do a focus on the elements of music, reviewing many familiar terms (tempo, dynamics, pitch) and introducing new musical terminology as well. It’s the common PYP cycle of analysis and synthesis: We break the music down
I Wanna Dance with Somebody!
Yes, I am a child of the eighties. I am also at a school with no dance in the curriculum, and I gather that many PYP music teachers are in similar situations. And whether or not there is a qualified
An Inquiry Into…the Instruments
Nearly everyone does a unit on the instruments of the orchestra, but there are as many approaches as there are music teachers. I’ve probably approached it in ten different ways in as many years within my own program. In my first