Students will review basic rhythmic notation, bar lines and time signatures, and count rhythm in phrases with dotted notes and rests.

Students work in groups to learn and perform a piece on non-pitched percussion instruments and develop rhythm reading and ensemble skills.

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 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.

Students will learn about Middle Eastern music, its transformations in the United States, and basic forms of belly dance movement. This lesson examines belly dance music, performed by Lebanese-American musician George Abdo, an example of music in Arab American communities during the 1970s.

Students will be introduced to American Bluegrass music and Appalachian songs through singing,
listening and conversation. A number of songs will be compared leading to a conversation on the
characteristics of Traditional American music.

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.

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.

In this lesson, students will listen to examples of love songs from several musical styles and historical moments. The activities are designed to explore how music and lyrics work together to express different sentiments toward love and relationships.

This lesson is remixed with at student view that can be used virtually/distance learning. In this lesson, students will listen to examples of love songs from several musical styles and historical moments. The activities are designed to explore how music and lyrics work together to express different sentiments toward love and relationships.

Overview:This lesson remix contains a virtual/distance learning student view.This lesson focuses on the music through which those hardships were expressed and on the daily lives of southern blacks in the sharecropping era. It is structured around an imagined road trip through Mississippi. Students will "stop" in two places: Yazoo City, where they will learn about the sorts of natural disasters that periodically devastated already-struggling poor southerners, and Hillhouse, where they will learn about the institution of sharecropping. They will study a particular Country Blues song at each "stop" and examine it as a window onto the socioeconomic conditions of the people who created it. Students will create a scrapbook of their journey, in which they will record and analyze what they have learned about the difficulty of eking out a living in the age of sharecropping

This lesson focuses on the music through which those hardships were expressed and on the daily lives of southern blacks in the sharecropping era. It is structured around an imagined road trip through Mississippi. Students will "stop" in two places: Yazoo City, where they will learn about the sorts of natural disasters that periodically devastated already-struggling poor southerners, and Hillhouse, where they will learn about the institution of sharecropping. They will study a particular Country Blues song at each "stop" and examine it as a window onto the socioeconomic conditions of the people who created it. Students will create a scrapbook of their journey, in which they will record and analyze what they have learned about the difficulty of eking out a living in the age of sharecropping.

This remix includes a student view that can be used virtually/distance learning. The repercussions of the Great Migration are far-reaching. Today, much of the restlessness and struggle that the Blues helped to articulate in the Migration era remains central in other forms of American music, including Hip Hop. In this lesson, students look to Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf as case studies that illustrate why African Americans left the South in record numbers and how communities came together in new urban environments, often around the sound of the Blues.