It’s never a bad time to think about your big-picture goals for the upcoming year.

Especially now, many educators are taking this time to get organized and make plans for next year to be their best year yet.

When we start planning our year, it’s a great idea to start with a broad overview of each grade level, and the conceptual understandings you want them to have at each level of your program.

Once you understand what concepts you’d like to cover, its much easier to choose songs, activities, performance programs, and finally to create your lessons.

Lesson planning is a breeze when you start big picture instead of lesson-to-lesson!

Creating an Idea Elementary Music Curriculum

What is a Curriculum Outline?

A curriculum outline answers the question,

“What am I going to teach?”

A curriculum outline covers your entire curriculum, at every grade level. It’s a zoomed-out view of your musical goals for your whole program.

I love this document because as the school year gets going it’s easy for me to lose track of my goals for my students.

A curriculum outline keeps me accountable.

Something to note right off the bat is that this looks at concepts, not at skills. This curriculum outline doesn’t show what you want students to be able to do with these concepts. Specific skills around improvising, reading, singing, and playing can be specified later in the planning process.

For now, the goal is to get a single sheet of paper that has all your concept goals for your students. This guides the rest of the lesson planning process.

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This curriculum outline is a part of my elementary music planning kit. This is a comprehensive guide to planning each grade level. It answers questions like,

What am I going to teach?
When am I going to teach it?
What materials will I use?
What strategies will I use?

Why Write Your Own Curriculum Outline

What we find in the process of creating a curriculum outline is that the act of intentionally thinking through your dreams for your students may end up being more important than the result itself. This valuable paper can have incredible benefit to your students and your own peace of mind.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with using resources that spell out a curriculum for you. These can be helpful starting guides and can get you going in the right direction if you’re struggling to get started.

The shortcoming with these pre-made curricula is that they fail to take into account your own personal teaching goals for your students.

In contrast, a curriculum outline is a simple way to map out your own ideal curriculum, tailor-made for your own program.

When its done thoughtfully, the rest of your curriculum has a straightforward structure, making it easy to plan out your year.

The Elementary Music Planning Kit walks through the steps to creating your own curriculum outline so it fits your specific needs. It also gives concrete examples and editable templates so you can adapt as you go!

You Can't Teach Everything:

Things are missing in the categories for a curriculum outline.

Where is the category for teaching music history? Where is the Jazz section?

As you choose what broad sections to include (rhythm, melody, form, etc.) you’ll notice that some topics simply don’t make the cut to be included in the curriculum outline. That doesn’t mean that we don’t teach them.

Rather, we choose concepts that are broad enough to encompass our other learning goals.

For example, there’s absolutely no reason that you can’t include a listen to the Surprise Symphony when teaching eighth and quarter notes to your 1st graders. You can also have a great time learning about Ella Fitzgerald when you work on la in A Tisket a Tasket.

The beauty of the curriculum outline is in its simplicity, and how broad it is to fit in the things that you truly care about teaching.

The Plan will Change.

Of course when we’re planning we would love to think that all our plans will be able to be executed perfectly, without a hitch or hiccup.

However, we all know that even though we’ve planned in things like snow days and field trips, the reality is that we will likely get off from our curriculum outline.

That’s okay.

Students may not learn at the rate we expect. Especially if this is your first time mapping out curriculum goals for your students or if you’re starting at a new school, be prepared for the possibility that your curriculum outline may end up looking very different from where you started it.

Every situation is different

Every teaching situation is different, and every school culture has a different musical background. The concepts and corresponding grade levels outlined in a curriculum outline from The Planning Binder might not be the exact fit for your students. That’s the reason all the files come as editable Google documents. Don’t be afraid to move things around!

Keep a Sequence and Build a Foundation

If you choose to make changes, remember that the concepts in your curriculum outline should develop logically, step by step, so your students are set up for success. It’s imperative that learning moves from the known to the unknown.

Also, remember that students need the knowledge and skills of previous concepts before moving to more advanced concepts. Especially with older grades, be sure students have enough of a musical foundation with the “easier” concepts so they can move to more advanced ones.

Start at the End

Take time to think about what you truly care about as a teacher. What skills and understandings do you want students to have when they leave your program? What do you want your students to be able to do at the end of each year? Break things down and plug them in.

You can’t teach it all but when you’re intentional about curriculum planning you can give students a solid foundation that allows them to be lifelong musical learners.

This is not a guide to Kodaly song analysis

In the Kodaly philosophy, song analysis is a huge part of making responsible decisions that maximize student musicianship.

This is not a guide to Kodaly song analysis.

Brilliant Kodaly-inspired pedagogues have already done that through levels training. This is a practical guide to extracting the most appropriate and musical segments of repertoire for conscious literacy work.

If this is a topic that interests you, I encourage you to look for Kodaly levels training near you so you can dive in deeper! The purpose of this specific guide is simply to move songs into the classroom with efficiency and integrity.

THE REPERTOIRE IS THE CURRICULUM

Musical learning takes place within the context of repertoire. In an active musical classroom, students use repertoire to discover musical concepts on their own.

The musical materials we use become the foundation of every other musical experience. Because of this, the repertoire is the curriculum.

When we have repertoire picked out, how do we know how to use it in the classroom?

BEFORE WE BEGIN…

Song analysis will be easiest if we have a few things already in place.

We’re set up well to analyze songs when we have:

A curriculum outline so we know what musical concepts to look for in each grade level
A scope and sequence that budgets our time, so we have an idea of how many songs we might need for each concept
A way to source quality musical materials

Matching Songs to Musical Concepts

There are two primary steps to take in order to know what songs can be used for specific musical concepts.

The first step is to take a musical inventory.
The second step is to analyze a song for classroom use.

These two distinct steps may take a few minutes to organize, but they will add clarity and intention to the rest of your year!

Musical inventory

Making a list of the musical components that make up the song can help us know what songs would be appropriate to use with specific grade-levels.

For example:

If we choose a song with an toneset of an extended full scale and hope to use it with Kindergarten, our students will not be vocally safe as they attempt to sing the song.
If we choose a song with a large variety in its rhythm and no repeated sections, we run the risk that the material will have too much contrast and not enough repetition for students to grasp easily.

Taking inventory ensures that we can use the materials safely and musically in the classroom.

What to Catalog

We’ll start by taking a scan of the musical elements in the song. This is just a way to get inventory. Not every element we record will necessarily be a focus in the classroom.

What are the rhythmic components?
What are the melodic components?
What is the form?
Where did you find it? (You can read more about sourcing quality materials here)

Example:
Here’s a musical inventory for the song, A Tisket A Tasket.

2. Matching songs with Musical Concepts

After a musical inventory, we’ll have an idea of what songs would be appropriate to use with what grade-levels. We also know what elements are in the song for students to explore.

Now, the question is where those elements fall in the curriculum.

When we answer this question, we want a new musical element to exist in a complete musical unit, and we want it to be surrounded by old material.

Find the musical units

When we target a rhythmic or melodic element, we want it to exist in a musical unit that is short enough for students to consciously work with. However, it also needs to be long enough for students to easily hear the tonality and meter.

The balance of these two is often found in a subphrase.

A subphrase is a small section of a larger phrase. It is enough material to constitute a musical idea, but it may not be a complete idea in and of itself (since a true phrase is marked by a cadence).

When you’re ready to match a song to musical concepts, identify its subphrases.

If you’re not sure where the subphrases are, start by looking at groups of four beats, especially if your song came out of the Western musical tradition.

Example:
Here’s an example of subphrases marked in A Tisket A Tasket.

2. Compare the material to your curriculum

The next step is to see where the musical material in the subphrase falls in your curriculum. This is where the curriculum outline and the scope and sequence come back into play.

Here’s the magic question:

When would students have conscious knowledge of the rhythmic or melodic materials that make up the subphrase?

Use your curriculum outline and your scope and sequence to find the grade-level and the time of the year students would consciously know the material.

As you cross-reference the material in the subphrases to the material in your grade-level curriculum, it will become clear which elements will be old, and which elements will be new.

Quality education moves the student from the known to the unknown. Because of this, we want to make sure the rhythmic or melodic materials in the subphrase are consciously known so students can compare them to the new, unknown element.

When you’ve identified a new element, surrounded by known material, in a complete musical unit, you’ve identified the classroom use!

Example:
In A Tisket a Tasket, the melodic material in the subphrase would be known around 2nd grade, with the exception of la. Since la is the new element, it becomes the pedagogical focus of the song. Here’s the song again with the units of melodic focus circled.

3. What will it look like?

This is the fun part!

With the new musical element picked out, the next side of the page addresses what you might do with the song in your classroom.

What active experiences could students engage with? How could they sing, play, move, read, write, improvise, or listen to discover the characteristics of the element on their own?

On this side of the page, jot down your ideas.

This process can take a bit of time.

However, at the time this blog post is being published, many of us are experiencing changes in our routine that leave us with more time for things like song analysis and long-term planning.

This may be the perfect time for you to pull high-quality materials, compare them to your scope and sequence, and analyze them for how they might live in your classroom - whatever your classroom looks like in the fall.