What Should They Be Learning: Fourth Grade

Fourth Grade
What Should They Be Learning?
By C. Roskos
11/14/2009
Melody:
• Major scale and minor scale
• Modes (basic)
• Solfege: all
• Tonic and Dominant degrees of the scale
• Recognize, improvise and create melodies using a poem’s rhythm or building bricks
• Staff (relate to “hand staff”), recognize most line and space note names in the Treble staff
• Identify the use of sharps and flats
• Manipulate, read and play melodic patterns from notation


Harmony:
• Sing ostinati
• sing 2 and 3 part rounds and canons
• sing 2 part songs
• sing partner songs
• Tonic and Dominant chords

Rhythm:
• Eight note by itself, syncopation, whole note and whole note rest, half note rest, dotted notes
• Question and Answer: improvise 4 and 8 beat patterns as musical questions and answers on body percussion, unpitched, and pitched instruments,
Dynamics:
• Crescendo and Decrescendo (words and symbols, read and play)
• ppp to fff

Tempo: Andante and Moderato

Meter:
• 2/4
• 4/4
• 3/4
• Duple meters
• Uneven meters

Form:
• D.S.
• Improvisation
• Question and Answer
• Compose a song/melody in ABA form
• Compose a piece in Rondo form

Timbre:
• Add color parts/sound effects to poems, haiku, stories and songs
• Identify specific musical instruments and their families
• Band/Orchestra

Movement:
• All of the previously learned movement skills
• Knows left and right
• Complimentary Statues (fill in the gaps of the other statue)
• All 4 levels of body percussion (stomps, pats, claps, and snaps)
• Experience movement in 2/4, 4/4, ¾, and 6/8
• Dramatize Art
• Create a visual “picture” to accompany music
• Multicultural dances
• Folk Dance:
o See previously learned skills, plus grand right and left, and other more complicated moves that require knowledge of right and left
o Longways Sets (complicated), Circle Dances (complicated), Sicilian Circle Dances, Square Dances (later in the year)
Instrumentation:
• Recorders
• Plays pitched instruments with expression, demonstration control of mallets by responding to conductors cues and playing various dynamics
• Solo improvisation on pitched instruments
• Creates melodies in pentatonic, hexatonic, major and minor scales and creates accompaniments to their melodies
• Accompanies songs with Tonic and Dominant Chords
• Drum Ensembles
Other:
• Working in groups and team work (how to chose ideas in a group-voting, rock paper scissors, etc…)
• Multicultural pieces and songs, African proverbs…
• Spirituals, gospel and work songs
• West Virginia songs and history
• Collaborate together in a musical play
• Demonstrate appropriate audience behavior
• Evaluates their own performances