Teaching Materials

KS3 world tour: folk music from Europe

Here, we’ll look at two of the many folk music traditions found across Europe, from its Eastern to its Western reaches. Though this means missing out on a huge range of fantastic traditional music...

Teaching Materials

Teaching autistic students

This resource will cover aspects of teaching autistic students as a visiting music teacher or workshop leader. Autism is a wide spectrum and autistic people can, of course, be vastly different from...

Teaching Materials

Edexcel AoS1: an active learning approach to Bach

Edexcel GCSE music requires students to study eight set works, the first of which is the third movement of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5. This resource will look at some different strategies for...

Teaching Materials

Eduqas AoS 1: ‘Badinerie’ from Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 2

Under Eduqas’s GCSE Area of Study 1 (Musical Forms and Devices), students must study the ‘Badinerie’ from Bach’s Second Orchestral Suite in depth. As well as giving students many tools for performance...

Teaching Materials

Christmas 2021: ideas for in-person and hybrid teaching

This resource uses Wham!’s Christmas classic ‘Last Christmas’ as the starting point for a range of creative and listening activities that will work for in-person and online teaching. It would be...

KS 3

OCR AoS 2 Barbra Streisand: Four songs from Color Me Barbra

These four songs from Barbra Streisand’s 1966 album Color Me Barbra are the prescribed music for OCR’s Area of Study 2: Popular song. They need to be studied in the context of other examples of music...

Teaching Materials

Ableton basics

This resource introduces the basic functions of Ableton, enough so that you’ll be able to make music with your class. We’ll introduce the software and provide classroom projects that can be used in...

Teaching Materials

Music exam boards: an overview

There are five Ofqual-regulated boards, and this resource briefly summarises what they offer. While it may sound obvious, make sure you thoroughly read the syllabus. Put away any preconceived notions...

Teaching Materials

Little Shop of Horrors

In this resource, we’ll look at the history and context of the show and the musical characteristics of the three songs. I don’t intend to go into the depth of analytical detail that can already be...

Teaching Materials

Edexcel AoS4: Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love

English singer-songwriter Kate Bush released Hounds of Love, her fifth studio album, in September 1985. It received immediate acclaim from critics and record-buyers alike, and was soon being hailed as...

Teaching Materials

Getting the most from Focus on Sound

Focus on Sound Pro is a piece of cloud-based software from Music First. This resource looks at features of the software, and explores how you can use it in your teaching across Key Stages 3, 4 and 5.

Teaching Materials

Arranging music for guitar

The subject of arranging is vast, so in this resource I’ll focus on chord and riff arrangement, since it’s the staple of most popular guitar playing. I’m also only working in the realms of popular...

Teaching Materials