Overview

Elementary general music helps our students become tuneful, beatful, artful musicians, with skills to last a lifetime.  Music class is one of six elementary specials and occurs in a 45 minute class once each four day cycle.  Students in music class develop listening, singing, playing and moving skills that build upon each other every year.  In music class students can expect to sing, respond to music, move expressively, play classroom instruments such as unpitched percussion, boomwhackers and orff instruments, listen to, create and improvise music.

Vocal Music classes in QCSD for grades K-2 are based on John Feierabend’s First Steps in Music musical ‘workout’ which includes 8 components outlined below.  These elements are practiced with a wide variety of repertoire whose ultimate goal is for our students to be tuneful (to have melodies in their heads and to learn to coordinate their voices to sing those tunes) beat-ful (to feel the pulse of music and how that pulse is grouped) and artful (to have an emotional and expressive connection to music) 

The First Steps Workout includes:

Pitch Exploration Activities

These sliding sounds are used at the start of class to help students engage the muscles used to sing, particularly with head voice.  It can be thought of as very similar to an athlete warming up muscles before athletic performance.

Song Fragments (echo songs and call and response songs) 

We progress from echo songs to call and response songs as we scaffold up in difficulty.  During these songs students often have a chance to lead the group in short solos. 

Simple Songs

Simple Songs use a limited number of pitches, are short and easy to remember, and should enable students to sing solos with success and confidence.  Pitch range increases as students are able to sing longer and more complicated melodies. 

Arioso

Arioso are spontaneous student sung solos.  These opportunities allow the children a chance to demonstrate their own creativity, musicality and thoughts through singing. 

Song Tales

Song Tales are stories sung for children.  These sung stories provide excellent examples of singing, quality musical literature, and expressiveness.  They also provide an opportunity for our students to work on their active listening skills and to make connections from their own experiences to the musical story.

Movement Exploration (Movement Warm Ups)

These activities are based on the Laban movement themes (such as space, weight, together/apart, levels, shape, flow, etc.) and help children develop body coordination and awareness as well as expressive sensitivity when paired with music.  This work provides students with a ‘movement vocabulary’ they can then use in movement/dance activities. 

Movement for Form and Expression  

These activities help our students experience the expressive qualities of music through movement as well as to experience form through organized movement (form is the way the parts of sections of a piece of music are organized.)   These activities may include fingerplays at younger ages and action songs and dance like activities in the later grades.

Beat Motion Activities Steady beat is essential to all later rhythmic development

Performing specific motions and movements while maintaining steady beat at specific tempos is our first goal, and once that is secure, our students move on to hearing, feeling, and performing beats in groups of two or three. These activities include songs, rhymes, and moving with recorded music. 

Once our second graders complete the goal of First Steps and become tuneful, artful and beatful, they begin to work on connecting the sounds and melodies they know with musical notation in a musical literacy curriculum known as ‘Conversational Solfege.’