March is Music In Our Schools Month (MIOSM), and the National Association for Music Education (NAfME) website provides ideas on how to participate in MIOSM and promote support for school music
Music in Our Schools Month
By Phil Nast, retired middle school teacher and freelance writer
Now, when public school music programs face budget cuts, is a critical time to support music in our schools. March is Music In Our Schools Month (MIOSM), and the National Association for Music Education (NAfME) website provides ideas in how to participate in MIOSM and promote support for school music. A menu offers downloadable MIOSM logos for web and print use, and activity ideas. How to Incorporate Music in Your Subject Suggests how teachers can include music in math, foreign language, social studies, language arts classes.
Lesson Plans
ReadWriteThink.org has a number of K-12 lesson plans suitable for MIOSM as do ArtsAlive and ArtsEdge. Here are some sample lessons and activities:
- Using Songwriting to Build Awareness of Beginning Letter Sounds Students in grades K-2 create alliterative animal songs to help them learn letter names and consonant sounds and build phonemic awareness.
- With ArtsAlive’s Activities & Games students in grades 3-8 can compose a few bars of music and identify instruments and composers in two quizzes. The site also has composer specific activities for Vivaldi, Beethoven, Schubert, and Mozart.
- Students in grades 9-12 learn about the traditional Mexican musical form of corridos, which dates back to the 1800s and continues to be very popular in Form and Theme in the Traditional Mexican Corrido.
Learn more at http://www.nea.org/tools/lessons/51007.htm