Students will gain an understanding of meter by experiencing accented and unaccented beats. This free lesson plan is designed to fulfill Standard #5 of the National Standards for Music Education: Reading and notating music.

"A lot of people thought we were an overnight sensation," says The Beatles' Paul McCartney in The Beatles: Eight Days a Week “The Touring Years," "but they were wrong." Indeed, though to many fans The Beatles seem to have been a big bang, bursting from Liverpudlian obscurity to international stardom with their 1963 debut album Please Please Me, quite the opposite is true. Between 1960-63, The Beatles worked. They were, after all, young men from the working classes of Liverpool, a city still recovering from World War II. They worked to earn money for basic necessities, playing pub sets both day and night and performing lengthy residencies in Hamburg, Germany, one of which included a stretch of 104 consecutive shows. They worked on repertoire, learning dozens of "cover" songs spanning several genres. They worked on their group sound, playing several sets a night and fine tuning the skills that helped them "hold" audiences at the dance floor, even those who may not have come specifically to see them.

In this lesson, students learn about the impact of The Beatles on their teenage audience, particularly in relation to the group's image as a "rock band."

Essential Question: How did The Beatles establish a new paradigm for the image of "the star," and how did that image support their global success?

In this lesson, students learn about the Beatles active stance against segregation and consider what the band's example meant for an emerging youth culture.

This lesson explores first the role Brian Epstein played in helping craft The Beatles' visual presence, group identity and team unity, the way he helped the group transition from successful nightclub act to international sensation.

By the end of their 1966 summer tour, The Beatles had grown weary of the live concert setting. Concurrently, they had become increasingly comfortable within, and inspired by the possibilities of the recording studio. In the fall of 1966, in a culminating moment, The Beatles announced that they would no longer tour and would instead focus their creative energy on making records.

In this set of lessons, students will gain a fundamental understanding of bebop while exploring how bebop reflected American culture and society in the 1940's and 1950's.

This lesson develops students' ability to hear subtle dynamic levels in orchestral music, and to recognize
sudden and gradual differences. They will use their collective perception to make relative aural judgments
about levels and changes. Data will be recorded on a bar graph marking real time and 6 dynamic levels
roughly equivalent to 6 primary markings of standard dynamics: pp to ff.

Students discover how music can create a visual image in one"™s mind as they listen to Beethoven"™s Sixth Symphony "“ Pastoral. As the image takes shape, the students create a visual representation of their image to include the aspects of nature which Beethoven included in this wonderful composition.

By listening to the words of Beethoven, students will become familiar with Beethoven's feelings about being out in nature and his desire to express these feelings through his Symphony No. 6, rather than create images of pastoral life. Students will explore and identify images of the countryside and feelings about the countryside, and note the difference. Students will identify and explore the range of possible feelings one may have when in the countryside. Students will respond to Beethoven's music and feelings about the countryside through creative movement.

Students write a descriptive essay explaining their thoughts and feelings while listening to Beethoven"™s 5th Symphony, learning how to describe the musical elements that cause them to feel this way, and transpose these feelings into a watercolor art piece. The students will present their essay and art work orally, and act out their responses during a physical education exercise.

In this unit, students will learn that improvisation is an acquired skill which will improve with practice. Students will use the 12 bar blues format as a vehicle to gain fluency with improvisation, creating a melodic line in the 12 bar blues structure. The lesson will culminate with students recording and transcribing their 12 bar blues solo.

This lesson examines both the content and form of lyrics in blues songs. In addition to highlighting the basic musical form of a blues song, it also addresses the use of floating verses in blues music, both within the context of the original era in which the songs were sung and also in relation to how this practice is perceived today.

Students will learn about dynamics, tempo, acoustics and instruments in the music of Charles Ives. Students will be introduced to and learn about the literary term onomatopoeia, and how they can relate it to the sounds of Ives' music. Making the connection between literacy and music, students will create their own musical onomatopoeias using various media, such as water color, tempera paint, crayons, magazine text and markers.

Students will exercise critical listening, singing, dancing, and playing instruments to traditional music of Bolivia. They will improvise rhythms, compose a song, and draw connections across a wide variety of disciplines.

In this lesson, students will investigate how teenagers became a distinct demographic group with its own identity in the postwar years, and, in turn, how their influence helped push Rock and Roll into the mainstream. In so doing, they helped secure Rock and Roll's place as the most important popular music of the 20th century.

In this lesson, students will examine the emergence of the teen idols in the late 1950swith a particular focus on Dion and the Belmontsto understand how mainstream culture promoted the image of the "good citizen" teen during an era of increased anxiety surrounding youth culture. Students will listen to recordings of Dion and the Belmonts' "A Teenager in Love," as well as Dion's later recording "The Wanderer," in addition to viewing a 1958 instructional film outlining school dress codes, a 1953 trailer for The Wild One, a selection of teen magazines, and performances by Jerry Lee Lewis and Connie Francis.

In this lesson, students assume the role of entertainment industry professionals responsible for marketing a selection of movies from the early Rock and Roll era. Following an examination of trailers, posters, newspaper articles, and the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930, students will present to the class on the various stakeholders that helped shape the way Rock and Roll culture was introduced to mainstream movie audiences in the 1950s.

In this lesson we explore one song Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode," released on Chess Records in 1958 and suggest several analytical frameworks in which one can deepen one's understanding of the song: using a listening template; using a timeline to understand a song's historical context; understanding Rock and Roll as a visual culture; understanding Rock and Roll as performance; understanding Rock and Roll as a literary form; and understanding the industry and technology of Rock and Roll. Of course, what we do with "Johnny B. Goode" can be done with any song. The objective is to understand a recording in the most complete way possible.