Create a viable, meaningful program that will motivate your students and have them participating with enthusiasm with Middle School General Music: The Best Part of Your Day. A welcome guidebook for music teachers trying to navigate the sometimes turbulent waters of middle school general music, it offers strategies and lessons that have been created in the real world of general music by a practicing teacher. Revised and expanded to align with the National Core Arts Standards, each section of this second edition is full of tips and lessons to help middle schoolers develop a life-long love of music. From instructional units to composition projects, rhythm games to listening lessons, you’ll find plenty of ideas for working with young adolescents. An appendix of suggested resources steers you to materials appropriate for middle-level students. Bolster your program with the discussion about why general music is so vital in middle school. If your music classes feel like the perfect storm, let McAnally make them the best part of your day.

Engaging Musical Practices: A Sourcebook for Middle School General Music presents numerous ways to engage adolescents in active music making that is relevant to their lives so that they may be more apt to continue their involvement with music as a lifetime endeavor.

Fertile Ground in Middle Level General Music guides music educators to inspire their middle level students (grades 5–8) to engage more deeply in the general music classroom, where students are given the opportunity to "try on" a range of roles: musician, composer, listener, and critic. The book outlines the Fertile Ground Framework, a teacher's aide for curricular decision-making that unites the middle level concept with the National Core Arts Standards while emphasizing the developmental needs and cultural identities of students. This resource-rich book provides teachers with an array of adaptable classroom support tools, including: Lesson sequences Activity ideas Teacher resources and worksheets "Do-Now" exercises Featuring the real-world perspectives of thirteen music educators, Fertile Ground in Middle Level General Music is both practical and theoretical, presenting methods for creating rich, inspiring learning environments in middle level general music classrooms of all shapes and sizes, and highlighting the unacknowledged strengths that already exist therein. Focused on the aim of motivating students to pursue lifelong music learning, this book helps instructors find joy and excitement in teaching a wide array of musical topics to diverse groups of middle level music students.

Recordings of works composed for band and suitable for grades 2-5.

As music educators continue to explore various ways of learning and teaching popular music, recognizing and understanding a blend of traditional and non-traditional pedagogies that engage teachers and learners in authentic practices is of vital importance. To meet this emerging need, Action-based Approaches in Popular Music Education delves into the practices and philosophies of 26 experienced music educators who understand both the how and the why of popular music education. This edited collection represents the variety, the diversity, and the multiplicity of ideas and approaches to the teaching and learning of popular music. It’s these actionable approaches, practices, applications, lessons, and ideas that will enable music educators to understand how to better incorporate popular music into their teaching. This book is not an antidote to the lack of uniformity in popular music education – it is a celebration of it.

Inspire and involve your adolescent students in active music-making with this second edition of Engaging Musical Practices: A Sourcebook for Middle School General Music. A practical and accessible resource, fourteen chapters lay out pedagogically sound practices for preservice and inservice music teachers. Beginning with adolescent development, authors outline clear, pedagogical steps for the creation of an inclusive curriculum that is age-appropriate age-relevant, and standards-based. You will find timely chapters on singing and playing instruments such as guitar, keyboard, ukulele, drumming and percussion. Other chapters address ways to make music with technology, strategies for students with exceptionalities, and the construction of instruments. Further, there are chapters on songwriting, interdisciplinary creative projects, co-creating musicals, infusing general music into the choral classroom, and standards-based assessment. The book is full of musical examples, sample rubrics, and resource lists. This second edition of Engaging Musical Practices: A Sourcebook for Middle School General Music is a necessity for any practitioner who teaches music to adolescent students or as a text for secondary general music methods courses.