Welcome to my music classroom. On this website you will find the curriculum for Otisville's K-4 music program. You will also find the calendar of our upcoming events.
Please click the three bars in the upper left corner to find the pages for each grade level.
Minisink Valley Central School District
Elementary Music Curriculum PreK-5 August 2013
Overview *
As a means of having a uniform teaching approach and methodology for core music, grades Pre-K through 5th grade, the core music faculty have decided they will implement the music curriculum created by Dr. John Feierabend. A national leader in music education, Dr. Feierabend is Professor of Music and the Director of the Music Education Division at The Hartt School of the University of Hartford.
First Steps in Music for Preschool and Beyond is Feierabend’s text for Pre-K through the beginning of 1st grade. Its focus is developing singing and movement skills, and is rich in traditional folk music. The design encourages students to be “tuneful, beatful, and artful.” He suggests the following “musical workout:”
1. PitchExploration
2. Song Fragments (echo/call & response songs) 3. Simple Songs
4. Arioso (Child-created Tunes)
5.SongTales(songsthattellastory) 6. Movement Exploration
7. Movement for Form and Expression 8. Movement with the Beat
Based on this methodology, the Pre-K/Kindergarten and the beginning of Grade 1 Core Music Units of Instruction include three strands―Tuneful, Beatful, and Artful. During the first quarter of first grade, students are assessed for their readiness to move into Conversational Solfege.
Beginning in first grade and continuing through fifth grade, students begin Conversational Solfege, Feierabend’s curriculum for teaching music literacy. This method uses a twelve-step process developing students’ aural skills, the way language is taught, before musical symbols are introduced. The curriculum incorporates rhymes, songs, games, and movement activities. This provides teachers with opportunities for differentiation (process as well as product), meeting the needs of individual students and their various learning styles, specifically visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners.
Steps one and two are rote learning, or “readiness” activities that have students echo the teacher. Steps three and four involve “Conversational Solfege” techniques in which the teacher speaks/sings familiar and unfamiliar patterns and the students are then required to aurally decode. These steps serve as an assessment of the skills gained and also require students to use higher-order thinking. In step five students are asked to create their own rhythm and tonal patterns then followed by musical notation. In the sixth step, students read patterns and music by rote, and then decode familiar and unfamiliar patterns and songs (read/sing out loud) similarly as they do in language literacy classes. Following three reading steps, the students then begin to write notation. In step eleven, the teacher speaks, sings, or plays unfamiliar rhythm and tonal patterns for students to write down. The final step in the twelve-step process is composition. They are required to first create their own musical patterns, and then write them down. Students are informally assessed at each step with a summative assessment at the end of step twelve.
*This curriculum utilizes an approach to music learning created by Dr. John Feierabend, Prof. of Music and Dir. of the Music Ed. Div., The Hartt School of the Univ. of Hartford. As presented here, the ‘First Steps in Music’ and ‘Literacy’ components of Feierabend’s methodology as well as the overview are based on the work of Greenwich, CT Public Schools, adapted for the PreK/K-5 music program at Minisink Valley with modifications in both scope and sequence.
Page TM 72 from Conversational Solfege Level 1, John M. Feierabend, GIA Publications