Grade 1 • Music What Your Child Will Learn

Grade 1 Music

What Your Child Will Learn

At all levels, Howard County music education focuses around these three artistic processes:

  • Performing: Realizing artistic ideas and work through individual or ensemble performance or presentation
  • Creating: Conceiving and developing artistic ideas through music making while connecting to historical, contextual, and personal events
  • Responding: Synthesis of meaning, context, and process through interaction with, and connection to the musical world

Musical concepts are carefully sequenced through kinesthetic, aural, and visual experiences. The student's singing voice is the primary instrument and developed throughout the elementary general music curriculum.

Melody and Pitch

  • Demonstrate ability to echo short melodic patterns (quarter note, two eighth notes connected, and quarter rest).
  • Demonstrate meter through singing.
  • Sing music using head voice and chest voice.
  • Experiment with high and low vocal sounds using limited vocal range.

Harmony and Texture

  • Recognize a melody alone or with simple accompaniment.
  • Listen and perform music using major and minor.

Tone Color

  • Identify classroom instruments by sight and sound.
  • Explore and discuss environmental sounds.
  • Distinguish between adult male/female and children’s voices aurally.
  • Demonstrate good vocal quality such as head and chest voice.

Tempo

  • Compare fast and slow.

Rhythm

  • Demonstrate ability to echo short rhythmic patterns (quarter note, two connected eighth notes, and quarter rest).
  • Practice and demonstrate steady beat through singing, speaking, and playing classroom instruments.
  • Perform two- and four-beat rhythmic ostinati.

Movement

  • Demonstrate musical characteristics.
  • Practice steady beat through locomotor and non-locomotor movement.
  • Follow musical cues in games.
  • Experiment locomotor and non-locomotor movement to show meter.

Dynamics

  • Compare loud and soft sounds.
  • Sing or play in groups matching dynamics levels (loud and soft).

Form

  • Identify same and different patterns (verse and refrain, call and response) aurally and visually.
  • Sing a variety of echo songs.
  • Echo short melodic pattern.