Grade 2 Curriculum

Unit 1: Community Music
Essential Questions:

• How does music unite us?
  
• How can we work together as a musical team?
  
• Why is it important to work as a musical team?
  

Enduring Understandings:

• Many communities throughout the world use music to form a tighter sense of community.
  
• Music can be used as a way to communicate.
  
• We can use music to bring our community closer together.
  

Objective:

• Be able to demonstrate and communicate strategies to make music together

Skills associated with objective:

• Sing songs that act as messages, ways of communication
  
• Play in a drum circle (play repetitive rhythmic patterns on drums with steady beat)
  
• Create community rules
  
• Perform folk dances that require cooperation
• Share folk songs from your own background

http://www.paosa.org/images/Orff%20instruments.jpg

Unit 2: Becoming a Composer
Essential Questions:

• How do composers create their music?
  
• How do I become a composer?
  

Enduring Understandings:

• Composers are people who write down music.
  
• I can write down music using rhythmic notation.
  
• I can play other’s compositions by reading their notation.
  

Objective:

• Read/write/create rhythms using rhythmic notation, and how to add pitch

Skills associated with Objective:

• Be able to read and write quarter notes, eighth notes, half notes, and quarter rests
  
• Listen to the Nutcracker and explore the following questions: What is a composer? Why do they do what they do?
  
• Play barred instruments and explore the following questions: what is pitch? How can you tell if a bar will be high/low? 
  
• Create and play our own rhythms

By the End of Grade 2:

• Demonstrate and communicate strategies to make music together successfully
  
• Be able to write/read/create rhythms using eighth, quarter, and half notes
  
• Play ostinatos on barred instruments
  
• Keep together a repeating groove using djembes