The lower school music curriculum is designed to foster an enjoyment and elemental understanding of music in our daily lives. Through a variety of games, dances, songs, and explorations, students learn to intuit, act, and produce in a musical way. Students create music with their voices and a variety of pitched and non-pitched percussion instruments and explore traditional games and dances from different countries and cultures throughout the world. By actively participating, students create a foundational understanding of the five elements of music: Melody, Harmony, Rhythm, Form, and Expression.
Music class centers around the communal enjoyment that is innate within a performance ensemble. While there are skills and techniques that students must master, instruction is scaffolded to ensure that each student feels a sense of inclusion and contribution to the final product. Students will walk away with a bounce in their step and a song in their heart.
Grade 1 students begin to use their voices in new and creative ways, learning to differentiate between simple musical concepts such as high/low, loud/soft, and fast/slow. In addition to singing popular folk songs and repertoire from a variety of genres, students begin to read and notate bi-tonic melodies.
Grade 2 students continue to expand upon the concepts of melody, form, and expression. As their vocal repertoire increases, so does their capacity to read and compose music. We begin to explore rhythmic and melodic dictation with simple tri-tonic melodies and rhythmic figures reinforced with purposeful and improvised movements. We enhance musical texture with a variety of pitched and non-pitched instruments.
In Grade 3, focus on folk music, creative movement, and musical concepts expands to include a variety of instruments, including the soprano recorder, and is the jumping off point for reading melodic notation. Students develop a firm understanding of melody and continue to explore concepts like improvisation, form, and harmony. As these concepts increase in complexity and nuance, students achieve new levels of musicality.
Grade 4 music is rich in creating and performing. Students play a variety of instruments, including the soprano recorder and soprano xylophone, and learn harmonic accompaniment and textural components. Performance settings include canon, partner songs, and improvisations. Vocal repertoire is rich with folk literature and songs from a variety of cultures, and students explore creative movement and perform folk dances. Students become comfortable notating in pentatonic scale and begin exploring other modes of the diatonic scale.