The goal of Tabb Elementary’s music program is to equip students with the tools to experience music as a source of personal enrichment, as a vehicle for the constructive expression of human emotions, and as a unique intellectual discipline. We also endeavor to supplement and enrich core concepts taught in the regular classroom. The National Standards for Music Education provide a framework for our music curriculum.
Music allows us to celebrate and preserve our cultural heritage, and also to explore the realms of expression, imagination, and creation resulting in new knowledge. Therefore, every individual should be guaranteed the opportunity to learn music and to share in musical experiences.~~MENC: The National Association for Music Education
Mission Statement
Tabb Elementary Music Curriculum focuses on the following concepts:
BeatIn the earlier grades, the focus is on feeling the beat and keeping a steady beat and then progressing to feeling the beat get faster or slower.RhythmThe later grades work on beat division and feeling how beats are grouped: in two, three, or four.
Earlier grades focus on short and long sounds.Pitch
At the end of grade one, students begin to relate to notes that receive 1 or 2 beats.
During grade two and up, students learn about the division of the beat and are introduced to eighth and sixteenth notes.
Early grades focus on high vs. low and up vs. down.InstrumentsLater grades focus on pitch syllables, intervals, and melodic contour.
Early grades use instruments for keeping a steady beat and adding sound effects. This includes using our brand new FOOT KEYBOARD! (Remember the movie “Big?”) We also use Boomwhackers, step bells, drums and all sorts of traditional and ethnic instruments.Movement
Later grades add instruments for accompanying, to add a variety of sounds to their music. Each year our fourth graders reach an important milestone in their musical education at Tabb, getting their own recorders! The students really look forward to this! It’s a sort of rite of passage that marks the transition from being younger students who only play very elementary, school-owned instruments to being more mature, more responsible students who have their very own instruments to play and care for. Eventually, they’ll have the opportunity to play even more sophisticated instruments in a band or orchestra setting or sing in a chorus in middle and high school.
Movement ranges from a simple march step in the earlier grades to more complex step combinations in the later grades. Periodically, the P.E. and Music Departments team up to maximize our resources as we teach our students the art and mechanics of movement and dance.Programs
Students engage in various activities for the weeks that they are working on a program. These include good singing techniques, movement, and drama.Sound of Music
Fifth Grade students explore the wonders of the science of sound in preparation for SOL testing. We examine the nature and theory of sound through class experiments and a variety of hands-on activities. This unit also encompasses an intensive study of the instruments of the orchestra, how they produce sound, and how changes in materials, size, or other aspects of instrument construction would affect their sound.
A thought from Mr. T:I teach music not because I expect you to major in music,
not because I expect you to play or sing all your life,
not so you can relax and have fun (although that’s definitely part of it!).I teach music so you will be human,
so you will recognize beauty,
so you will have more love, more compassion, more gentleness, more good. . . in short, more life.
See Mr T. live and in concert with the Virginia Wind Symphony.
"Without music life would be a mistake." -- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900), German philosopher
