Long Range Plans

 School boards' have been posting their jobs, and every day teachers are hearing what they'll be doing in September; new permanents, long term occasionals, permanents in new positions. Many of these are going to be in music teaching roles for the first time. And many of these have minimal music experience. 

One of the first questions asked in the Facebook music groups by these teachers is "Does anyone have a long range plan for music for grades xyz." Unfortunately, that's not an easy question to answer due to the complexities of elementary music education in Ontario. There's no provincial requirement for the amount of music education at each grade. Even within one school board, it can vary enormously. That doesn't even go into the inequities of resources. 

While teachers do offer their long range plans, it often doesn't help the new teacher much.  One teacher might see every class for 30min a week, and another teacher might see them for 90 min a week. Some schools teach music all year and some do it one or two terms. Then there's issues of how many music teachers are there in the school. Often primary students are taught by their classroom teacher so each class might get a different level of exposure, and then in junior level there's one teacher trying to mingle all these experiences. 

Although it's not going to be directly helpful to most other music teachers, I'll share the LRP I used last year (not sure if it's even readable):

         

More useful is learning how to create your own plan.

Some teachers will take the three Overall Expectations and cover one per term. Within these expectations, they have to make sure the music elements are examined, and learned. I wanted to increase my students' knowledge of the elements because I had seen how weak they were, so I approached each element as a unit. This didn't mean we ignored other elements during the pitch unit; I just had to weave it all in (sometimes easier said than done!). 

I was blessed with getting to see the same students all year, and all classes except a straight grade 4 class had 90 minutes per week (some grades were 3x30min, some were 1x30, 1x60; there's benefits to each structure). This meant planning to cover the same topic (element) at the same time across all grades would make my life easier. As well, I did have different classes learning recorders, ukuleles, and band instruments. It worked out though that all classes were nearly in the same place all the time.

If your students are strong in the elements, you might want to structure in a different way and that could be by the Overall Expectations (after all, that is how most subjects plan for the year). 

If your school board or school highlights different cultures each month, use this to your advantage and anytime you can, include music from that culture in activities and lessons. Learning about the Blues Scale (grade 7) and chord progressions (all grades) lends itself nicely to Black History Month. 

Do you want to cram recorders into 6 weeks and get it done and out of the way? A lot of the elements can be covered with recorders, but it's harder with ukuleles. Ukuleles are awesome for learning chord progressions and form. If you're teaching band instruments, will you have one class focus on them at a time, or all classes? How many instruments do you have? Will you create a band?

What about if you don't have any instruments? There's a lot available digitally, and don't forget the oldest instruments everyone has with them at all times--voice and hands! 

I found it helpful to look at our total number of days (187 here) and figure out how many music classes each class would get. Then I took a guess at how long we could spend on each element. We ended up taking music longer on rhythm than I expected. Things always come up--assemblies, special requests (Remembrance Day performance), everyone away for a sports event. Maybe the tech totally fails one day (two years ago we went a week with no wifi--which also meant no photocopier). Leave a LOT of buffer room. If you don't need it, it can be easily filled with fun activities for a couple classes!

The other thing to consider is how long will you teach the students.  Maybe you're just there for the year and you want to cram everything you know into the year incase they don't get a music teacher next year. Or maybe you're the non-music teacher trying to get through the year. If you're teaching just one division, find out from the next division up what skills and knowledge they really want the students to have. Maybe you're permanent and can create a five year plan--fantastic! While the curriculum lists different concepts for each element for each year, Duration, Pitch and Expression slow down by the end of the junior years.  If you need to keep building their rhythm skills, for example, it can still be covered in the intermediate years.

I'm trying to figure how to add some pictures or graphics to this post. It looks very wordy. Sometimes, I guess that's just the way it is. I don't like adding superfluous graphics just for the sake of having graphics.