I always see a lot of posts asking what to teach. What to teach when, for what grade, when you run out of stuff, etc. But I think there are a few things that are REALLY important in a music classroom. These are things you can come back to, include again, and approach a variety of ways when you need to fill out lessons. Here are my teaching non-negotiables in elementary music that can help you find things to teach.

Steady Beat

For me this is the big SKILL that students need and I’ve talked about this before. “It impacts their lives as readers, dancers, movers, audience clap-along-ers, and more. But how do you define steady beat to kids because it’s ‘abstract’. It’s not like we can point to it on the board and say, “this is steady beat, ok?” So let’s break down steady beat.”

Steady beat takes time to develop, and I’d argue even our oldest students should be doing steady beat activities every so often. All their other skills are scaffolded on their ability to keep a beat. For older students that can mean having beat activities while others are going on such as partwork with a steady beat underneath, pass the beat activities like passing games, body percussion, and follow me in canon activities like Sagidi Sagidi Sapopo. If your students can’t do anything else when they come out of your class, I’d argue this is the one that is the most important in terms of skill.

Pitch Matching

This one is up there for a variety of reasons. If your students can’t match pitch, other tasks will be incredibly difficult. When they are adults and can’t sing along with a band they love, it will affect them. If they can’t sing a tune to a baby or child, it will affect them. If they are “that friend” that can’t sing at all, it will affect them. Now, I’m not saying all our students need to be amazing singers, but students should have the ability to match two tones that are alike, hum a pitch back and sing simple tunes mostly in tune simply as skills for the rest of their lives.

Not only that, but our speech isn’t monotone. Vocal inflections and change of pitch is a natural part of human speech. Some languages, tonal languages, involve even more pitch changes than English. But for English speakers, accent on a part of a word changes the use (noun vs. verb) EX: PROject vs proJECT. Nouns commonly have the accent on the 1st syllable where as verbs often fall on the second which is how we inherently know how to say them. Source

While accent isn’t pitch, they do both play a role in speech. Pitch shows up in inflections that change the meaning of sentences. “You went to the store.” vs “You went to the store?” Working with pitch is important for our students.

Experience

There is a huge wide world of music. If we don’t help our students experience music from everywhere, from different genres, from different time periods, music that sounds different, music with different tonalities, with different instrumentation, with microtones, with different tonal centers, and in different languages and teach them to seek it out, will the ever do it themselves? Normalize hearing things outside of Western classical music. Normalize hearing things outside of what’s on the radio. Normalize hearing different instruments from around the world.

I’m sure by now you’ve heard the Windows, Mirrors, and Sliding Glass Doors quote from Rudine Sims Bishop. It’s about literature. But it applies to music too. When I was a kid, I took Croatian dancing. I took a break at one point in second grade and went back to it in high school. I learned to play the tamburitza. But it was never something we talked about in school. But when I hear tambura music, I feel home and it feels normal. None of my heritage groups were the big groups talked about often (Filipino, Croatian, Bulgarian. I learned about the Chinese heritage later). But when they DID come up, I felt seen. Not that I had language for that. We can help our students feel seen. We can help them see others.

Joy

Isn’t this the point? What brings your students joy? Is it a certain game? Do they love partwork like singing in harmony, playing and singing or partner songs? Do they love hearing music from other cultures? If you need something to teach, find what brings joy. Music IS joy. Embrace the joy. You know how satisfying it feels when your students had fun in class. At the end of the year, when I’m out of things to teach, or when students need a pick me up, I’m about the joy.

Hope this sparks a few ideas!