Music for Teachers

The follow link provides a range of sources to support parents in giving thier children a good start in music making.

Music for Parents

Bad Penny Blues  link 1

Humph - wikipedia link 2

The new Music orders for KS3 can be downloaded here:

Link to QCA

For Shropshire secondary music teachers the next network meeting will be entirely devoted to practical work based on updating schemes of work in line with the new orders.

This network meeting will be on November 6th from 1:00-4:00pm at the Shrewsbury Training and Development Centre.

A source of World music CD’s is not always readily available locally so I hope this list of some website worth visiting will be useful - please feel free to add others.  Here’s the link

I’ve recently been listening to music by Philip Glass, a composer who has often been described as ‘minimalist’ although he prefers to be thought of as a composer who works with patterns of sound. A recent (2006) recording by Naxos of the Symphony ‘Heroes’ is worthy of exploration in the classroom.

It uses as its inspiration the David Bowie album ‘Heroes’ - it does not try to give a simple orchestral rendering of the work but genuinely explores the themes in an orchestral texture. All the movements are based on tracks from the album, which was a collaboration between Brian Eno and Bowie.

Naxos is a superb label offering a massive range of material in a wide range of genre and at a low price.

For more information try the following links:

Naxos

Philip Glass - Heroes Symphony

David Bowie

Notes for the first (yellow) level and the second (green) level of Music Explorer are available as pdf files as follows:

 yellow level notes and green level notes

Friday December 1st 2006 sees the launch of the Shropshire initiative to begin to support the Secondary National Strategy in teaching and learning in Music at Key Stage 3.

All music departments in Shropshire have been invited to attend at the Shrewsbury Training and Development Centre (1:15pm - 4:00pm) when the strategy will be introduced by Keith Havercroft (School Improvement Adviser - Music and e-Learning - Shropshire LA), Margaret Lloyd (Head of Creative Arts - The Marches School and Technology College), and Ken Lumley (Head of Music - Meole Brace School and Science College).

Colleagues will be issued with, and guided through, the resources and briefing DVD and will engage in representative examples of the support materials as they begin to see the context and rationale for the planned changes to the Key Stage 3 music curriculum.

Further details will be posted after the event.

As a result of some work I’ve recently undertaken with a primary school, it reminds me that I placed some time ago on the website a series of ideas for getting started to support clarity of learning objective when teaching composition. While these starters are not fully formed lessons they may be none the less useful for teachers who are lesson clear about the direction to take to support composition. Although the National Curriculum (for music) has been around for nearly 10 years I think the area of composition is very much disregarded, while the national debate centres on vocal work.

Feel free to contact me for further help with composition.

The updated Music manifesto was published recently and arrived on my desk last week. The details can be seen via one of the above ‘page‘ links. The manifesto website is available here

Please draw your KS4 student’s attention to the revision materials on the BBC website at the following link