Blog Posts

Long Term Planning with Musicplay

Denise Gagne

Long term planning for K-6 music classes is a time consuming challenge. There are new provincial curriculums, new Nafme standards, new district and school expectations to deal with, and there isn't any more planning time for the teacher OR instructional time for the students. Where to start?

In putting together Musicplay, the starting point is the scope and sequence. What do I want to teach in each grade level? I started with Alberta, Ontario and BC curriculums in hand, Nafme standards, my Lois Choksy Kodaly books and Exploring Orff. This is the Scope and Sequence that is used as a basis in Musicplay:

Scope and Sequence page 1

The next step is to translate the scope and sequence into musical activities that will help children become musicians who are singers, players and listeners. These activities will include singing, playing, listening, moving, reading/writing, and creating. I divided up the activities into 38-40 weeks or lessons and from that I make a year plan. Alberta's school year is 197-200 days, which is about 10 days longer than American schools.

Key concepts are reviewed in each grade level. Beat, rhythm, and solfa is reviewed in each grade. Reading songs are included in each week of Musicplay, and these songs are sequenced so that by the end of first grade, students can read ta, ti-ti and rest and can sing so-mi and la-so-mi songs. Songs and activities to teach tempo, dynamics, form are woven throughout each grade level. There are not only activities to teach music literacy - reading and writing. There are many, many opportunities to have the children create their own music.

After the initial activity/song choices were made, I had to look at the choices to ensure that there were musical examples from many cultures, songs in French and Spanish, and songs from every continent. I wanted to include listening examples from early music to modern music. I wanted Musicplay to include music for performances, and choral selections. I wanted to start round in Grade 2, and I wanted a new round every 2 weeks for Grade 3-6. Two part selections were included in Grades 3-6.

Other considerations included finding songs to support the themes that classroom teachers, (especially in kindergarten) teach. One of the reasons that kindergarten has many more songs than the other grades, is that K teachers kept requesting songs for a variety of themes, and songs to support basic skills like colors, numbers, counting, etc.

Musicplay includes many menu options. You choose the song(s) and the activity from a range of choices. It isn't an expectation that you'll teach every song or do every activity.