From the CLS eNews 012116 -
Chris Treder, WELS teacher at Apostles Lutheran School in San Jose, Calif., has a collection of music he wrote for use in classroom music curriculum and with junior choirs. He is offering his music via the Alive in Christ Music website and you can download the music for free. There is both instrumental and choral sheet music, and a service for Ascension available along with other helpful resources.
Thanks Jason - I emailed the link to my piano player son (and his piano teacher). I'm sure he will be thrilled. All my kids like to pluck out video game music on their instruments. :-)
A mostly web-based music curriculum that teachers in the KML federation took a look at a couple of months ago. Get a bunch of schools together to look at and and they just might bring food. They had Panera cater a meal for during the presentation!
Great music available for free under the Creative Commons license. Good for video productions, etc. There are all different genres available for whatever mood you wish to strike. Many classic pieces that would be suitable as a background pre-service or pre-function filler. Curated by WFMU radio station.
Has anyone ever used something like this in his classroom? I have students that greatly enjoy having some music playing in the background (I limit it to classical piano, mostly). Anyone know of a study that demonstrates if this helps students learn?
I've used Simply Noise in my classroom of 5th graders and I have had mixed results. Some kids really like it and some hate it. I tend to prefer the brown noise as opposed to white or pink noise. I think I might make less of a deal of it with my next class next year and just use it for a little longer period of time to get a better read on its effectiveness. I took my students to on a field trip to Environmental Systems Inc in Brookfield, WI and they use brown noise generators throughout their office/cubicle area to mask ambient noise. I found it very soothing. They used to have it timed to go off at 4pm and they found that their employees subconsciously sensed it was time to leave for the day. Not wanting to encourage them to leave early, they decided to gradually bring the volume of the noise down over the course of 30 minutes and that took care of their issue. Not necessarily applicable to what you were asking about, but kind of interesting.