Grade+3

__Overview of Third Grade Music__
We continue to develop our audiation skills. In third grade, we begin to transition into inference learning. The teacher guides students in the learning by providing the challenge, but ultimately the student must teach himself how and what to learn. This is done when the student compares what he knows (familiar) against the unknown (unfamiliar) and makes choices about the music. This is best facilitated in improvisation, creativity, and composition activities in the classroom. In third grade, we spend a lot of time improvising, creating variations of familiar songs and composing new songs.

Again, by third grade most children will have command of their singing voices. We continue to talk about developing healthy vocal habits. Your vocal chords are muscles within the body that need to be taken care of. Warming up the voice, refraining from yelling, and drinking water instead of soda are some of the strategies I encourage to maintain a healthy voice for years to come.

In third grade, students understand how to audiate and identify meter. We now begin to compare meters (partial synthesis) and play with meters. We change duple meter songs into triple meter songs and vice versa. We also begin to read and write rhythm notation (symbolic association).

Students also understand how to audiate and identify tonality. We being to play with tonality in a variety of ways too. We change songs from major tonality to minor tonality and vice versa. We begin to look at tonal patterns in notation. Lastly, we take all of this information we’ve learned about tonality, meter, and melody and compose our first piece of music in small groups.

Students understand how to audiate chords within music. We continue to reinforce and practice hearing and identifying chord changes. We add new chords in third grade: subdominant and subtonic. We continue to accompany our songs on instruments using xylophones, Q-chords (electric autoharps) and keyboards