• Course Description

    In each unit in fifth grade, students have the opportunity to create, present, respond to, and connect with a variety of musical forms. They imitate, echo, read, and create music and learn to use musical vocabulary to describe and respond to music. Students will explore with dance, rhythm, vocal music, instrumental music, and music notation. Students will consider what musical forms and dances are appropriate for different cultural celebrations and develop a program of music for a public event.

    Grade Level(s): Fifth Grade

    Related Priority Standards (State &/or National):  Missouri Fine Arts Music Standards

    Essential Questions

    • How do we decide what we want our dance to express?
    • How do we describe dance moves with words others can understand?
    • How can we learn a dance by imitation?
    • How do musicians decide when a performance is ready to share?
    • How do performers select pieces that go together for a repertoire?
    • How can we predict how music will sound by reading music notation?
    • How do we decide when our performance sounds the way that it should?
    • How do musicians make creative decisions about how they want their performance to sound?
    • How do musicians practice to make their performance sound more like what they intended?

    Enduring Understandings/Big Ideas

    • Dancing together helps groups of people connect with each other and helps individuals feel included in large groups.
    • Dances can express ideas that are appropriate for different occasions.
    • People can create new dances by making new combinations of familiar steps.
    • Musicians who play together have to listen to each other while playing their individual instruments.
    • Rhythm helps musicians play different parts in unison.
    • Musical notation records pitch, rhythm, and expression.
    • Musicians reading musical notation can sing through a piece and anticipate what they will need to work on in practice.
    • Before we try to judge the quality of a performance, we have to agree on our preferences and criteria.
    • Music helps groups of people set the tone for their celebrations. Different kinds of music are important at different celebrations. 
    • Musicians listen to each other and agree how they want their music to sound. They practice together to improve.

    Course-Level Scope & Sequence (Units &/or Skills)

    Unit 1 - Movement and Choreography

    • Students will demonstrate locomotor and non locomotor movements to music alone, with a partner, or as a group by creating and performing original choreography.                                                        
    • Students will experience movement through a varying musical form (AB, ABA, Rondo form, theme and variations). Students will perform movement from a variety of cultures.
    • Students will vary familiar forms to create and teach each other new dances.

    Unit 2 - 4-5 Part Instrumental Piece

    • Students will perform a variety of instrumental music with melodies, chord progressions and layered accompaniment, simple and crossover bordun, ostinato on instruments with proper technique.
    • Students will demonstrate rhythms including 4 16ths notes, whole note, whole rest, and half rest, eighth, eight two 16ths, and two 16th eighths, and syncopation by reading standard music notation.
    • Create a program of pieces that work together for a single event.

    Unit 3 - Applying Music Literacy

    • Students will independently identify, read, create, improvise and perform pitches on a treble clef staff with rhythmic notation in duple (quarter note, paired eighth notes, quarter rest, half note, half rest, whole note, whole rest, 4 16th notes, eighth two 16ths, two 16ths eighth, syncopation), and triple meter (dotted quarter, dotted quarter rest, 3 eighth notes, quarter eighth, eighth quarter, eighth rest).
    • Students will be introduced to tablature and lead sheets. 
    • Students will sing and play instruments from musical notation.                    
    • Students will write musical notation for a created piece of music.

    Unit 4 - Multipart Singing

    • Students will independently, read, create, and improvise using the diatonic scale.
    • Students will sing songs in a wider range and experience major and minor tonalities while singing in 3 parts (ostinato, canons, partner songs) with expressive qualities (dynamics, consonants, open vowels, etc.).
    • Students will listen and respond to music by describing its expressive qualities.
    • Students will agree with a group on how they want their performance to sound and use strategies to improve.

    Course Resources & Materials: TBD

    Date Last Revised/Approved: 2022