The year
In music we sing, move, play and listen, and every grade builds on the one before it. Here's roughly where each grade is this year, what you might hear about at dinner, and what your child might bring home from the music room: a song to sing, a rhythm to clap, or a piece to play for you.
Pick your belt and play along. The fingering shows up on the recorder while the beat counts you through. You can slow it down, loop the hard part, and turn the backing music up or down.
Open the trainer →
Thirty-two countries, one song each, and one winner. Follow the class bracket as the songs go head to head, round by round, until we've got a champion.
See the bracket →We use Quaver, a music curriculum built around singing, moving and playing (no worksheets). We start with steady beat, then rhythm, then reading music we've already played, with a lot of games and singing along the way.
Fourth grade's big project is Link Up, a partnership between Carnegie Hall and the Seattle Symphony. This is where students put the skills they built in Quaver to work. Over the year the class learns a set of pieces on recorder and voice. Then in the spring we go to a live concert and play and sing along with the orchestra from our seats! This year's program is The Orchestra Rocks, and it's all about rhythm, beat and groove.
Fifth graders learn how a piece of music is put together. Then they write their own and come up with a short story to go with it. The final project is a music video. They plan it, argue about it, and finish it, and honestly that's most of the lesson.
Recorder Karate is just for fourth graders. It's how they get ready to play the orchestra pieces for Link Up. Each belt is a new song, and each one adds a skill they'll need for the concert music.
Students earn a belt by playing its piece correctly, and testing is completely optional. You can test at Recorder Club before school or record it at home. Nobody has to, it isn't graded, and you can try as many times as you want.
Each test gets two numbers, one for the right notes and one for the right time, and together they're out of ten. I keep the recording, so there's always a reason behind a score. If you're wondering about one, ask me and we'll listen to it together.
We've got two choirs this year. In the first semester, Concert Choir works up to a big winter concert celebrating the winter solstice. In the second semester, Select Choir sings with the middle schoolers, sings the national anthem for some local sports teams, and wraps up with a concert at the end of the year.
Both are real choirs. We learn parts and we perform, and the parent crew makes the whole thing possible.
Honestly? Almost nothing. Ask your child to play you whatever they're working on, then listen to the whole thing without correcting it. I'd say that's the best minute a family can spend on elementary music.
