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Games for children in music

Children like games. They find it easy to play with toys, building blocks, and puppets. Children require an experience of creative play with music to enhance their understanding of musical concepts. This website's sketch pad and rhythm band games foster children's understanding of pitch, rhythm, and melody. Aural listening is a good tool for children to understand music. By listening, they get an experience of how an instrument sounds, what pitch sounds high or low, and how a melody sounds. This enhances their musicianship before they get into the details of these aspects of music.

This site gives students the ability to create satisfying compositions that explore texture using loops that are designed to fit in with each other. Perfectly suited for differentiation, students can create works that are simple or complex.

Music Improvisation Arranging Music

Incredibox is a web-based mixing tool, and its purpose is to create mixes with pre-set loops including, beats, effects, voices, and melodies. In each "dude", the user needs to select a "clothing piece" that contains a specific loops. The user begins creating their mixes, and can add and delete them as needed. Musically speaking, it is a teaching tool because the user learns how to mix loops ate certain points. It enhance several concepts such as rhtyhm and meter. It can be used by elementary and secondary-level students.

A great article showing how to take a well known tune and teach students how to compose their own melody. The article goes through the process of how to teach it. First you help students to write a base line, have them improvise a rhythm, then they can discover the notes of each chord, and write their own melody using chord tones.

Hookpad is a free web app that simplifies songwriting by helping you choose chords that sound good together and guiding you to write a good melody. It's a musical sketchpad with music theory "built-in" to make it easier and more intuitive to find the sound you're looking for.

Hookpad is a free web app that simplifies songwriting by helping you choose chords that sound good together and guiding you to write a good melody. It's a musical sketchpad with music theory "built-in" to make it easier and more intuitive to find the sound you're looking for.

This indispensable chart (including youtube links) details familiar tunes that use specific intervals within their melody. An imbedded tool allows the user to view the interval on staff paper and hear what it sounds like before exploring the songs listed. This is a great aid for ear training

This indispensable chart (including youtube links) details familiar tunes that use specific intervals within their melody. An imbedded tool allows the user to view the interval on staff paper and hear what it sounds like before exploring the songs listed. This is a great aid for ear training

The Music Animation Machine offers videos that visualize pitch and rhythm in a way that is easy to understand. Voices are color coded (and arranged vertically by pitch) so that various melody and harmony lines are easy to follow. The website details the history of the project and offers several videos to watch.

The Music Animation Machine offers videos that visualize pitch and rhythm in a way that is easy to understand. Voices are color coded (and arranged vertically by pitch) so that various melody and harmony lines are easy to follow. The website details the history of the project and offers several videos to watch.

This is a nice colorful ear training game for melody recognition and sight reading. I think it would work well in middle school. I feel it might be a bit advanced for elementary.

Another helpful site for when you have to write a musical critique. I especially like there "SHMRG" acrostic: Sound, Harmony, Melody, Rhythm and Growth (texture/formal structure) Good for students when evaluating a musical performance.

This is a good resource for folk melodies from Europe. It's an open-source site with an extensive written database.

This free site includes an on-line orchestration course and a free jazz arranging course. There are sample music libraries, a virtual instrument forum, Linux Audio and music discussions related to sound software and open source initiatives, a virtual piano forum, and many more topics for students and teachers.

Great website for band programs with limited instrumentation or for small chamber groups with nontraditional instrumentation.  Each band piece can be played as a solo or the full work.  The sheet music provides every instrument with the melody and the part for the band version.  New titles are added frequently!

I really like the composer-related activities, especially when they related to recorder. I think that many times, students (and parents and classroom teachers) don't view the recorder as a real instrument. I think this is a great way to show them that they can play along with famous classical melodies. 

This could be good for small ensembles and combos. Creates a melody, harmony, and bass part customized to instrumentation needs. Also provides lyrics.

Pandora can be used for my students to listen to songs the orchestra is presently learning or planning to learn in the future. This always comes in as an asset because of our rote style teaching method and performing from memory. If the basic melody, bass line and chord progression is familiar; it makes the music easier to learn.

Has pictures as well as audio recordings of all types of instruments around the world, including voices. Also has rhythm, harmony, melody, form, texture, tonality, signs and symbols, music technology.

Free online Jazz standards for use with your ensembles

Chord charts from the Real Book - no melodies, with transpose button

This is a wonderful free book to support creative musicians. This page discusses active listening strategies. It outlines elements to listen for: sounds, harmony, melody, rhythm, and form.

MuseScore3 is full-featured, open-source music notation software. This software is installed directly on a computer, and has compatible versions for PC, Mac, and Linux operating systems. There is no online or "cloud" version of this software. Although MuseScore is free, it is a professional music notation alternative to Finale and Sibelius and is capable of producing high-quality musical scores in a variety of formats. MuseScore also has full capability to produce audio playback, export to audio, and generate MIDI files.

MuseScore is a free music notation program that is easy to use and can produce easy to read, high quality sheet music for your ensembles. The interface is similar to other notation programs that you need to pay for. I have been using MuseScore to create etudes and warmups for my ensemble classes.

MuseScore is a music composition and notation software used to write/notate music. It requires the user to download and install the application on their system. This application is easily accessible and is free of charge. It is a software that is updated almost every month to make the features better. Muse Score has an easy to use interface and is a good tool to use in class for children to write down their simple compositions. Students are able to play back their compositions to their classmates, print them out, and/or even share them online. While using MuseScore, students learn many different musical concepts like dynamics, timbre, form, texture, structure, melody, repetition, phrasing, rhythm, tone, to mention but a few. MuseScore enhances the musicianship of students.

Getting students to improvise is sometimes a very tricky task--lending itself as one of the most difficult challenges we face as teachers; however, author Steve Treseler provides a concise list of 10 steps, or strategies, for approaching the aforementioned topic with students, which includes but is not limited to building community through improvised games, choosing a piece that remains in one key center, and teaching all students the melody. By following these 10 easy steps, Treseler is convinced that students will receive the support they need to perform with confidence.