Three-part lessons exist in many different areas of education. This article suggests warm-up activities that can be used in a range of musical contexts in the ‘starter’ part of the lesson. However,...
Anna Gower Secondary education
It’s quite a soft touch to use Copland’s Rodeo as an example of AoS4’s Western classical tradition since 1910 in the new AQA GCSE specification. This resource is about providing context for Rodeo’s...
Jonathan James Secondary education
With Year 10 students, teachers are now nearly halfway through teaching the new GCSE music courses, and here I provide some support for Area of Study 4 of the Edexcel specification, which is simply...
Simon Rushby Secondary education
The new 9-1 GCSEs are supposedly more rigorous than their predecessors. In practice, however, this looks like a slight increase in the amount of music theory knowledge expected for the exam, and an...
Jane Werry Secondary education
Whatever our motivation for setting our students off with a songwriting task, there’s always a danger that with familiarity comes an assumption that it’s something they’ll be able to ‘just go off and...
Anna Gower Secondary education
Edexcel’s GCSE specification for examination in 2018 includes a new Area of Study, AoS3: Music for stage and screen, which features two big hits from Hollywood and Broadway. This resource gives a...
Jonathan James Secondary education
This resource draws on the techniques of an ‘animateur’ (workshop leader) and puts them in the context of the curriculum, considering practical ways to approach features in all eight of the set works...
Jonathan James Secondary education
As a teacher, Olivier Messiaen taught many of the figures who became giants in the post-war avant-garde – among them Boulez, Stockhausen and Xenakis. And as a composer, he sits on a line from Debussy...
David Kettle Secondary education
Many music departments include modules on minimalism in their KS3 and KS4 schemes of work. A contemporary musical style that uses simple repetitive diatonic phrases with catchy rhythms and engaging...
David Ashworth Secondary education
The new GCSE music specifications have ensured that all four boards now expect students to be confident listening to and appraising unfamiliar music. With three of the boards providing students with...
John Kelleher Secondary education
In part one of this two-part jazz resource (Music Teacher, March 2017), we traced how jazz evolved from humble beginnings as a folk music into being the mainstream popular music of its day. By 1945,...
Jonathan James Secondary education
In this resource, I give advice on how to tackle the background to the topic, recommend some online resources, and provide a ‘way in’ to the music itself, including specific works that could be...
Jane Werry Secondary education