All Recent Lesson Plans

A Round and A Round

Description:

Students will compose original lyrics for a "Round". They will develop a copyright, a recording company, and CD covers for their original pieces. Advanced and Honors students will compose their own original melody for this activity. The students will also teach these "rounds" to the students in their respective choral music classes.

Goals:

1. To provide students with a knowledge of the musical composition - the "round"

Passball

Equipment: 3 bases, home plate and a dodge ball

Setting up:

    Divide students into two teams. Rules are similar to Kickball. Catching a fly ball is out. (No bunt, no foul and no homerun rules apply in the gym.)

Playing the game:

Table This!

Table This! is a lesson that will teach students to set up a simple table in Microsoft Word. I introduce this lesson by comparing a table to a Bingo card. Each card is divided into Columns and Rows. The word BINGO is spelled out across the columns and a different number is in each row.

Once that connection is made, I tell the students that they are going to create their own BINGO card except their card will include vocabulary words related to computer hardware instead of numbers.

ABC Identification Freeze Tag

One or two children are given "Boffers" to use as safe taggers. When a child is tagged, they must freeze and can only become unfrozen when they tell the teacher who is circulating around, a word that begins with the letter that is agreed to at the beginning of the round. For instance, these taggers will freeze you and you must think of A words to become unfrozen. More teachers in the class help to keep things moving. Make sure to tell children they may only use a word one time. If larger area you can add more taggers.

Voice-leading for Roots - a P4 Apart

Lesson Plan Title: Part Writing for Roots a Fourth Apart

Concept / Topic To Teach: How to write four-part harmony between two chords whose roots are a perfect fourth (or the inverted perfect fifth) apart.

Standards Addressed: Students must be able to write four-part harmony according to tonal harmony conventions as covered on the National AP Music Theory Exam.

General Goal(s): Given two chords with the roots a perfect fourth (or its inversion) apart, students will be able to demonstrate the use of three different methods.

Michelangelo Art

Objective:
Students will learn about the artist Michelangelo and what it was like to paint the Sistine Chapel.

Time Frame:
Depending on how deep you go into learning about Michelangelo and art itself. It could be a short 45-minute lesson or it could stretch out over several weeks. The actual art part of it should take at least 30 minutes, but again could take longer depending on your type of media.

Materials:

Make Your Own Constellation Myth

Concept / Topic To Teach: Constellation Myths
Standards Addressed:

    MS&T #4: Science
    ELA #1: Information, #2: Literary Expression, #3 Analysis and #4 Social Interaction

General Goal(s): Students will understand what a constellation is and what a myth consists of.

Specific Objectives:

An Arithmetic lesson that uses decks of cards

Name of Activity: Salute

Materials:
- a deck of cards per three students

Activity:

1. Place students into groups of three students per group.

2. Have two students sit facing each other, while the third student sits so they can see the other two students (like in a triangle shape).

3. The two students who are facing each other are the guessers They both choose one card from the deck (excluding the face cards) without looking at the card.