MusicClasses

Kodaly and Orff: Making Music Together.

This unit is designed to introduce students to the structures, procedures/routines, and tasks of being aware and building community, and to set the foundations for their new learning community. These lessons are dedicated to making music real in their worlds, getting students excited and ready to learn, supporting social learning, and having them identify themselves as musicians. This unit is aimed at building enduring habits of good reading, singing, playing and creating music using the Kodaly Today and Orff-based Gameplan curriculum.

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Enduring Understandings:

From Wiggins & McTighe: “An understanding refers to transferable, big ideas having enduring value beyond a specific topic; it is universal generalization.” What we want students to understand and be able to use several year from now, after they have forgotten the details. Is it transferable? Can you teach it over and over again? Does it connect to other things?

As evolving musicians, we build relationships around singing, movement and playing instruments, so that our classroom becomes a community, which is safe to take risks, to share ideas, and to ask for help.

As evolving musicians, we utilize our singing, speaking and listening skills to have discussions about what we see and create.

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Essential Questions:

Wiggins & McTighe: “Essential questions are not answerable with finality in a brief sentence; their aim is to stimulate thought, to provoke inquiry, and to spark more questions. Essential questions do not yield a single straightforward answer.” Essential questions come from the Enduring Understanding that has been turned into a question. Usually begins with: how, what, or why.

What is steady beat?

What is the rhythm?

Why does the music make you want to dance?

How does culture affect music? How does music affect culture?

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