Oh Canada!

The big idea of my unit is to explore Canadian culture and diversity through music, focusing in particular on three distinct groups: Maritime/Newfoundland music, French-Canadian music, and First Nations/Inuit/Indigenous music. Students will develop knowledge on each of these three groups through singing traditional and modern songs, playing circle and dancing games to incorporate big muscle movement into their learning, and also by working on a large summative project that fuels their creative, improvisation, accompaniment, and team-building skills.

Ultimately, I want my students to know and be able to do/show the following:

· Describe, share, and value music from various Canadian genres

· Reflect upon understandings gained through exploration of different musical genres within Canada: First Nations, Inuit, French-Canadian, Quebecois, Acadian, Maritime, Newfoundland, and Western-Canadian music

· Listen to, perform, and reflect upon songs, stories, singing games, rhymes, drumming, and changes from Canadian culture and genres

· Develop a passion for learning about ‘new-to-you’ music and cultures, through performing and experiencing performances by musicians living those cultures (through in-person demonstrations, videos, audio, etc.)

This unit is structured around the idea of ‘sound-before-symbol’ teaching. Students will experience music aurally, kinaesthetically, and orally, before labelling and reading its symbolic representations, then reinforcing their newfound knowledge and transferring this into meaningful musical responses, and finally creating their own new music using those labels and experiences they learned previously. In short, these translate into ‘play’, ‘label’, ‘explore’, and ‘create’. Following this four-step process helped the lessons to fall into a logical and natural format with a clear beginning, middle, and ending to the unit. I added a final lesson to include room for final performances of the big unit project- performing is also an important part of being a musician and a skill that can only be learned well through practicing it in a safe, welcoming, and supportive environment.

I chose this unit because in September I will begin teaching ESL at a school in Shanghai, China. As someone who has a strong foundation and focus in music, I will find it a new (and exciting!) challenge to teach mainly ESL classes, but because of my Dutch roots I also know firsthand how incredible music can be for teaching the ins and outs of a language. When I discussed this unit plan with my supervisor (who has been and is the most incredibly supportive, knowledgeable, and inspiring mentor over my last six years at Acadia) and told her of my upcoming position, she suggested I create a unit that would give me material I can also use in an ESL classroom, especially in China. I will easily be able to pull activities and songs out of this unit plan to teach to my classes in Shanghai, and cannot wait to share Canadian music, culture, and games with them through my love of music! While there are clearly more than three distinct groups of music within Canada (which I touch on in Lesson 4) I decided to choose three in order to provide a great variety of activities and music throughout the unit yet maintain some structure and general theme, to keep students interested and intrigued, and also to highlight what I feel are three quite ‘large’ representations of music genres/styles here in Canada.

Unit Overview