1st grade starts the year using percussion instruments to show how they can keep the steady beat and read and play rhythm patterns.  

They learn about all kinds of instruments.  

They sing and/or play instruments with patriotic songs as they discuss what it means to be a good citizen.

 They also study about and sing songs from different cultures.

 They play songs and instrument sounds in the keyboard lab later in the year where they focus on musical synonyms (such as pitch) and antonyms (such as high/low, loud/soft, up/down)

2nd grade starts their year mapping music and comparing it to a map they may use to find their way around their community.  

They play percussion instruments while following a listening map. 

They will go to the keyboard lab where they can focus on how music can have the same values as money

(The whole note - the dollar, the half note - half a dollar or 50 cents, the quarter note - a quarter or 25 cents)

They end the year with songs about American Folk Heroes through Tall Tales.

 3rd grade should be able to name all 46 counties in SC after singing, and playing percussion instruments with the rhythms of the counties in a song sung to the tune of Yankee Doodle. 

They see how songs can be poetry and how the use of specific words can bring the song and/or poem to life.

They learn how math, (addition, subtration, multiplication, division, and fractions) can help them as they write rhythms.  

They will add that knowledge to the new knowledge of the notes on the staff while learning to compose their own piece using recorders and the keyboard lab.  

Information about Quaver will be given out for them to be able to access music games and their recorder songs at home.

  4th grade will play up a storm on percussion instruments.  I mean it!  

They play their own creations of Storm Poems with a variety of percussion instruments including onomatopoeia that give dynamics to the poem.  

They continue to use math (multiplication, division, and fractions) as they create their own compositions

They apply the idea of fractions to the division of note values and the use of the time sigature while playing recorders and visiting the keyboard lab.  

5th grade will travel through time in music starting with Reconstruction.  We discuss the African influences that were brought here before this time.  We use the World Music Drumming series to help create polyrhythms by layering a variety of rhythms that includes the call and response form.  The student review the games that children of sharecroppers played and listen to sharecropper blues songs as they discuss the reasons they had to feel "blue."  They will continue to learn more about a variety of styles of music throughout the year as they move through the decades in history.

They will see Mrs. Craft's collection of old records, 8-track tapes, and cassett tapes as they traveled from the invention of the telephone, phonograph, graphophone, and gramaphone up to the technology used to play and record sound today.

 They discuss equivalent fractions and will use Phil Tulgas - Musical Fraction Bars (Boom whackers) as a way to see how cutting tubes into a fraction of another can create a specific pitch that will match the pitches they learn on recorders and in the keyboard lab. 

They use the C-scale to create their own composition using the writing process: (brainstorming, 1st draft, revise, edit, final draft).