What Should They Be Learning: Third Grade

I need to give credit where credit is due.

When I created these "what should they know" outlines, I pulled from some material I received from Heidi Lucas, a lot from the WV CSO's, more from my Orff levels with Jim Solomon, Karen Medley, Mary Helen Solomon, and Janet Robbins, and from what I do in my own classroom.

I tried to think of what questions student teachers asked in the past and include that material in my outlines.

Third Grade
What Should They Be Learning?

By C. Roskos
11/14/2009

Melody:

• Major scale and minor scale
• Pentatonic
• Solfege: d, r, m, s, l, d
• Tonal centers
• Identify step wise motion, skips, and leaps
• Recognize, improvise and create melodic patterns using a poem’s rhythm or building bricks
• Staff (relate to “hand staff”), recognize some line and space note names in the Treble staff
• Manipulate, read and play simple melodic patterns from notation


Harmony:

• singing ostinati
• sing 2 part rounds and canons
• C chord

Rhythm:

• All building bricks: ta ta; ti-ti ta; ta ti-ti; ti-ti ti-ti; ta rest; (reading, playing, and manipulating building brick cards)
• Half notes, whole notes, dotted notes
• Syncopation
• 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)

Tempo: Ritardando, Accelerando

Meter:

• 2/4
• 4/4
• 3/4

Form:

• AB
• ABA
• AABA
• Rondo (ABACADA…)
• Introduction and Coda
• Repeat signs
• D.C. al fine
• Question and Answer
• Improvisation

Timbre:

• Identify specific musical instruments and their families
• Band/Orchestra

Movement:

• All of the previously learned movement skills (see K, 1st and 2nd grade)
• Use all space (high, med, low)
• Should know left and right
• Statues, Shapes, Paths
• 3 levels of body percussion (ex. Pats, claps and snaps; or stomps, pats, claps)
• Experience movement in 2/4, 4/4, and ¾
• Multicultural Dances
• Folk Dance:
o See previously learned skills (2nd grade) including do-si-do, promenade, right and left hand turn, swing, cast off and arch, star left and right, sashay
o Longways Sets (more complicated), Circle Dances (more complicated), simple Sicilian Circle Dances (end of the year)

Instrumentation:

• Accompany singing on pitched instruments
• Create a melodic accompaniment to accompany a pentatonic song
• Play shifting triads (or a shifting chordal pattern) with a pedal (on tone 1 or 5 of the scale)
• Introduce Drum Ensembles (using simple pieces)
• Play following a conductor’s cues

Other:

• Working in groups and team work (how to chose ideas in a group-voting, rock paper scissors, etc…)
• Multicultural pieces, singing games, passing games, etc…
• Spirituals, gospel and work songs
• Dramatize poems and stories and create sound effects to accompany them
• Demonstrate appropriate audience behavior
• Evaluate their own performances