Group items tagged

These are research-based strategies to help motivate and empower students in music practicing.  It gives learning goals and outcomes for progress in practicing and learning with checkpoints.

This is a document that addresses how to make the most out of practice time! These tips may come in handy in conversations with students, parents, and administrators.

This is a document that addresses how to make the most out of practice time! These tips may come in handy in conversations with students, parents, and administrators.

Jazz ear training and warm up ideas

This resource serves as a simple list that can be used for choral teachers of different ability levels to get a basic handle on teaching middle school chorus. It offers many teaching ideas that can help teachers become more connected with their student's singing through their teaching. There's many categories for the teaching techniques including: teaching middle-level girls, boys, and mixed voices.

Article written to support the use of technology to compliment instruction and enhance student learning instead of technology for technology sake. Teachers should use social media cites, e.g., blogs, to facilitate discussion and feedback from students, create online PLNs. The cross curricular benefit is increasing writing facility and literacy. A couple of concerns are cyberbullying and parents who may question how much learning is taking place with social media. Educators can help others, including students, understand that music learning can take place outside of the classroom through social media and broaden the audience.

The ChoralWiki (CPDL) is a great resource for choral teachers and choir directors. There is access to free music, texts and translations, seasonal indices, and discussion forums for questions and answers about music, rehearsal techniques, and performance. 

Choral director on a budget? This website features over 20,000 scores by over 2500 composers! An amazing resource of free music available mostly in PDF format for use and downloading.

The Choral Public Domain Library is a free and legal source for free sheet music! This site offers printable scores of public domain music, often complete with text and translations when necessary. You can search this catalog by composer, title, arrangements, voicing, accompaniments, language, and genre. Complete with over 31,000 scores by over 3,200 different composers, there's a high possibility that any choral director might find something of use here!

This website offers a multitude of resources designed for music-making. This specific organization is devoted to offering musical programs to students who are in the 80% of the population that are not involved in performing ensembles. It offers curriculum, lesson plans, and interactive activities for guitar, piano, drums, bass, ukulele, composition, voice and more. There are free PDF songbooks and lesson plans that are connected to the program, that are extremely helpful towards teacher and student interest. The best part of the program is that the majority of the music is examples that students know already - a lot of pop, rock, and even hip-hop. It connects the bridge between traditional musical concepts with music of today.

Little Kids Rock has a multitude of resources for creating a modern band in your classroom. There are songs loaded on the website that include tab for ukulele, guitar, and bass. There are also drum set patterns included. This website serves to expose educators and students modern band and provides lesson plans to go along with the popular songs. Little Kids Rock also provides workshops on how to effectively teach a modern band program.

This website offers many lessons for instruments that students may be interested in playing (piano, guitar, songwriting, drums,etc). The website offers video lessons as well as current play-along songs for students to put their newly learned skills to work.

This website contains PDFs of music that is available for free to download in the United States. The music is public domain or available via a Creative Commons license. There is also an option to purchase some music. While bandmusicpdf.org is strictly for wind band music, IMSLP contains music for band and orchestra, as well as vocal and other instrumental works. This is very helpful with finding older music or replacing parts, especially with music that is out of print.

The International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) is a great site to find timeless works of instrumental and vocal music. The site is free to use, but membership is available. The public domain site is easy to navigate and provides scores and recordings out thousands of composers and their music. Make sure not to click on advertisements and download something on accident in the free version. This site is a great resource for educators to find musical works from great composers that are no longer in print, and they is free.

IMSLP is a website where anyone can search music that is no longer under copyright law. Here you can find music from a symphony score to a Beethoven piano piece. This resource can be used by growing student-run ensembles that wish to perform classical music. I use this website when I want to practice bassoon repertoire or when I need to find another piece to practice on piano. This is also a great resource to show students how to properly find music with educated keyword searches through a public domain.

Welcome to Opus Music Worksheets, a database of high quality, free printable music education resources for download, including free sheet music, music theory worksheets, music flashcards, music business forms, and many other free music learning resources for music teachers, music students, and parents.

Opus Music has a great series of music worksheets suitable for general music and ensemble classes. The lessons are sequential and logical and provide clear descriptions of each topic in the lesson material before providing exercises for completion. The worksheets are available in downloadable PDF formats. These worksheets would also work well as substitute assignments if needed as a non-music teacher could figure out the directions.

The Opus Music website is a great resource for teachers looking for free printables. It is not a in-depth site, but instead offers a series of music theory worksheets, speed note name tests as well as flashcards and teacher printables for: business cards, lesson registration, lesson assignment and lesson billing. This site is geared towards a private studio teacher, but I have found the theory worksheets useful for beginning music students as well. All the material is free. There are also links to music teaching resources.

Easily create your own rubrics. Complete rubrics on iPads, tablets or phones. Collect data offline with no internet access. Compute scores automatically. Print rubrics or save as PDF or spreadsheet.

Folk Song Collection that may be used to help find songs for teaching almost any musical concept. Primary and Secondary Sources with authentic notation and referenced material.

The American Folk Song Collection is a website that music educators can use to search for hundreds of folk songs. Each song includes a PDF of lyrics, melody, game/dance directions, song analysis, rhythms, and original source (some also include recordings). The website also includes basic information about the Kodaly approach.

The Kodaly Center website is a valuable resource for all music teachers and especially those teaching elementary general music. The website contains videos about the history and philosophy of Kodaly, as well as recent news and upcoming events being held at the center. The most impressive feature of this site is the pubic domain library of songs and the precise ways they are categorized. Songs can be searched and categorized by: Origin, region, state, subject, song type, grade level, tonal center, scale, tone set, melodic range, melodic element, melodic motive, rhythmic element, meter, form, formal analysis and game type. Once you find a song you can see all of this detailed information as well as (in most cases) listen to the song, often sung by a child or group of children.

Iowa High School Music Association bulletin. Has all of the regulations for music events in the spring including solo and small ensemble and large group festival.

My 6th grade students ask every year if we can play the star spangled banner at the Veteran's day ceremonies. I now have a version that is possible for them to play!

We go christmas caroling every year to the nursing home. I use some of these arrangements.

Garageband lesson plan/ideas for middle to high school students. Can be adapted to specific needs, but is very well done with a lot of information, including plan outlines, scoring, assessments, and rubrics.

Article about adverse childhood experiences in Iowa. Describes how many students deal with these traumas and how we as educators can learn about how their brains are affected so when we are teaching them we are aware of the state they are in. You can't teach a student until they feel safe in your classroom.

This article from the choral journal discusses issues surrounding including transgender students in the choral classroom. It centers around using meaningful conversation and dialogue to make these students feel comfortable. It also works through common scenarios and equips readers with vocabulary to address this in their own classrooms.

This site is amazing!!! The purpose of this resource is to provide not only teachers, but parents, students, and kids the tools necessary to enhance musical learning. The musical content on this site includes but is not limited to history lessons, composer biographies and activities, instrument identification lessons, orchestral breakdown, a vast musical library, and tons of supporting pdf documents and sheet music for classroom/non-classroom instruction. It is a performing arts site, so you should also check out or pass along knowledge for french and dance educators as well!

Arts Alive provides teacher, parent, and student resources including lessons of composers, activities and games, instrument lab, recordings, and videos.