Music
Rabbi Rami Strosberg

Kiindergarten
The kindergarten curriculum has basically centered around singing. We learn songs about chaggim (our holidays), Shabbat and other topics. The children learn vocabulary in Hebrew and Yiddish while they move to and learn about musical elements such as: steady beat, tempo and form. Great emphasis is also placed on listening, which is actually very hard for some children because many times it means they have “to wait” to clap, or “wait” to play accompaniment. Music trains and develops the ear and much emphasis is placed on “learning how to listen.” This is done through lots of singing, lots of listening and lots of movement.

1st Grade
At first grade, children are introduced to two orchestral instrument families, but only one or two instruments per section. Students may learn about what a violin looks like and perhaps a cello but still may not know the name of a string bass or viola. They may be able to identify a flute but certainly not a bassoon.

Lots of emphasis is placed on singing to teach form, rhythm, melody dynamics and tempo. We start learning about melodic direction and play games to help reinforce that concept. There is a lot of work with percussion instruments and training the ear.

2nd Grade
Our orchestral unit is greatly expanded upon in 2nd and 3rd grade as all instruments in all of the sections are learned. Students are not expected to aurally discriminate between the sounds of an entire orchestra, but are usually able to visually identify most of the instruments, with bassoon being the most difficult!

We use games such as “bingo” to reinforce our skills. The children may listen to an instrument sound, and then they have to find the picture of the instrument on their card, thus reinforcing both the visual & auditory character of what they hear.
As many songs as possible are used to tie into the curriculum as well.

3rd Grade
Our orchestral unit is greatly expanded upon in 2nd and 3rd grade as all instruments in all of the sections are learned. Students are not expected to aurally discriminate between the sounds of an entire orchestra, but are usually able to visually identify most of the instruments, with bassoon being the most difficult!

We use games such as “bingo” to reinforce our skills. The children may listen to an instrument sound, and then they have to find the picture of the instrument on their card, thus reinforcing both the visual & auditory character of what they hear.
As many songs as possible are used to tie into the curriculum as well.

4th Grade
We review most of the above, spiraling it as it develops into more detailed content. Singing is still a major part of our curriculum. The children still love to sing and accompany themselves at this age and the beauty of that is we can do more difficult works and start to focus on harmony by the singing of rounds. This intensifies aural discrimination and makes the ear work much harder. Challenges include singing one part, while hearing another. We talk more about form and color at this age and describe what makes one piece sound different from another.

5th Grade
We review most of the above, spiraling it as it develops into more detailed content. Singing is still a major part of our curriculum. The children still love to sing and accompany themselves at this age and the beauty of that is we can do more difficult works and start to focus on harmony by the singing of rounds. This intensifies aural discrimination and makes the ear work much harder. Challenges include singing one part, while hearing another. We talk more about form and color at this age and describe what makes one piece sound different from another.

Middle School
In Middle School Music we work on advanced concepts such as composition and instrumentation. By assigning instruments to student-written rhythmic patterns, we can reinforce the knowledge of fundamental musical elements including tonality, meter, tempo, rhythm and form. This is always done in cooperative learning groups so the feeling of community through music is experienced. Students also prepare and perform rhythm unit since rhythmic dictation is a big part of developing the ear. One popular learning activity is when the instructor establishes a beat, plays a measure of a particular rhythm on the piano or just claps it out, and the students have to transcribe what they hear in musical notation. The highlight for many children is when we study about music in the world around us.

While we still do a fair amount of singing, quite honestly, by 7th grade, many of the boys would rather not sing because of their changing voices. Some years, the 6th graders create “Chanukah raps” and perform them for other classes.

It is in these upper grades where students will be introduced to jazz and contemporary music so that they can see that even the Beatles used form, harmony and had to pay attention to things like tempo, dynamics and orchestration.