Music

What's Happening in Music Class?

Kindergarten and 1st Grade:

• Keeping a beat, recognizing fast and slow tempo, recognizing loud and soft dynamics, recognizing high and low pitches, connecting stories to music , learning songs by rote- listening and echoing, singing in unison, identifying instruments and knowing how to play them.

2nd and 3rd Grade:

• Keeping a steady beat, understanding structure of songs, echoing rhythms, creating rhythms, singing simple rhythmic and tonal patterns, singing rounds, using movement to music, understanding pitches and how it relates to written notation.

4th and 5th Grade:

• Beginning to play recorder (4th), identifying musical genres, independently keeping a beat at various tempos, improvising melodies and rhythms, furthering musical vocabulary, identifying meter, identifying note values and pitches, beginning to learn two-part harmony, creating and notating rhythms.

6th and 7th Grade:

• Using musical language to describe music, reading notes and rhythms of given songs, identifying time signatures, counting rhythms in a piece of music, identifying family of instruments, singing three-part harmony, improvising rhythms and melodies, writing music, listening to music of various styles and genres.

8th Grade Grade:

• Furthering music vocabulary, furthering theory knowledge, understanding music in relation to history, identifying musical time periods and important composers, identifying different musical styles, explaining elements of music, learning aural music theory, singing three-part harmony in small groups.