Enduring Understandings

• Personal Choice and Vision: Students construct and solve problems of personal relevance and interest when expressing themselves through music.
• Critical and Creative Thinking: Students combine and apply artistic and reasoning skills to imagine, create, realize and refine musical works in conventional and innovative ways and to understand the works produced and performed by others.
• Authentic Application and Collaboration: Students work individually and in groups to focus ideas and create and perform music to address genuine local and global community needs.
• Literacy: As consumers, critics and creators, students evaluate and understand visual and performing artworks and other texts produced in the media forms of the day.

Grades K-2 Progress Points

Students will, at an appropriate developmental level:

1. Demonstrate how musical elements communicate meaning and emotion by playing, singing or moving to music.
2. Recognize the use of music for various purposes by performers and listeners in a variety of cultures.
3. Create music in simple forms to be performed with dance, drama or in response to a work of visual art.
4. Individually and collaboratively select ideas and a media form of the day to create musical pieces.
5. Use digital technology to listen to and study music recognizing instruments, voices, ensembles and musical forms.
6. Form and express opinions about music they hear in formal and informal live and recorded performances.

Grades 3-5 Progress Points

Students will, at an appropriate developmental level:

1. Sing and play instruments, focusing on how musical elements such as tempo, beat, rhythm, pitch, form, harmony and timbre create meaning.
2. Listen to and perform a wide variety of music from multiple cultures focusing on the historical and cultural significance of the works.
3. Identify and classify voices, musical instruments, roles and careers of musicians.
4. Relate historical information from the study of music to other art forms and disciplines outside the arts.
5. Develop criteria to evaluate solo and group performances of music.

Grades 6-8 Progress Points

Students will, at the appropriate developmental level:

1. Analyze, practice and perform a musical selection independently or collaboratively with technical accuracy and expression.
2. Read, write, improvise and describe music using standard musical notation and vocabulary.
3. Apply problem-solving and critical thinking skills to music listening and performing by adapting music to fit the context, story, setting and medium.
4. Classify and describe composers and historical musical periods, including classical, popular and traditional American music and musical and cultural blends.
5. Compare and contrast ways that the subject matter in musical selections relates to other disciplines.
6. Expand the use of technology and the media arts through music research, composition and performance.

Grades 9-12 Progress Points

Students will, at an appropriate developmental level:

1. Develop vocal and/or instrumental solo and/or ensemble performance skills to include performance through traditional classical and other notations (e.g. chord symbols in jazz).
2. Articulate a personal philosophy of music including personal valuing, musical preferences and involvement.
3. Develop, analyze and apply appropriate criteria to evaluating pieces of music and musical performances within and outside the classroom.
4. Read, write, improvise, compose and describe varied types of musical repertoire using vocabulary that demonstrates an understanding of the language of music appropriate to the genre and culture.
5. Recognize the roles of vocational and avocational musicians in learning, creating and performing across history and cultures, with focus on the function of music in society.
6. Use multimedia including media arts and music technology to create, analyze, rehearse, present, record and disseminate music of a variety of styles.
7. Apply study, performance and collaborative skills learned and used in music to other arts and non-arts subject areas.