New Elementary Piece!
Skin and Bones was arranged by Chris Ortiz (One of our favorite National Teacher Summit clinicians) and we hope you will give it a try in your classroom!
New Elementary Project!
Sound and Story is a project that gives students the opportunity to reimagine the use of the guitar by discovering sound effects as a way to inspire the story writing process. This can be a great way to allow your students to collaborate, contribute their narrative, and successfully create something meaningful on their instruments. This project would work great in any program or campus event such as PTA meetings, or literacy night.
Elementary Primer
The GuitarCurriculum.com Elementary Primer is designed to immediately engage your students in thoughtful, expressive, and technically sound guitar performance from day one. It is carefully sequenced to encourage transfer of skills and knowledge and ensure that every young guitarist is successful leading into the standard, 9-level curriculum and our overarching goal is to help you to facilitate lifelong musicianship in your students.
GuitarCurriculum.com Elementary Primer focuses on just a few basic guitar techniques through rote learning in ensemble performance. The majority of this elementary packet involves a mixture of rote learning melody and chordal accompaniment while reading rhythms. These rote pieces lead seamlessly into Level 1 of the standard curriculum where students are asked to read pitches and note values, improvise, and perform large ensemble pieces with priority on musical expression.
In preparation for teaching your students proper playing position, technique, and execution of expression, watch the video tutorials on GuitarCurriculum.com. You can focus primarily on videos 1-3b for information on proper playing position, right hand stroke using index and middle fingers, and left hand finger placement. Watch the Dr. Duke videos for helpful ideas for effective teaching. All pieces in this packet are taught primarily by rote with optional Step-Up notation to teach note values and give the student a visual representation of the music. After the final piece in this packet, the ensemble will move into Level 1 of the GuitarCurriculum.com sequence where they will begin to read standard notation on open strings.
Many of you teach a general music curriculum in your classes that might include Kodaly, Orff, recorder, choir, and many more. We encourage you to incorporate guitar into other ensembles as an accompanying, melodic, and percussive instrument. With a solid foundation in classical guitar technique, your students will be able to read, improvise or learn by rote, any part you wish to include in a multi-instrumental ensemble or choir.