Why You Should Make MusicFirst Elementary Your New K-5 Curriculum
For the past two months, I have been on the road at music educator conferences around the US and UK. I have had the opportunity to speak with hundreds of music teachers, as well as present and attend numerous sessions on the various offerings that we have at MusicFirst for K-20 music educators. A few products have stood out from the crowd this season, and none more so than MusicFirst Elementary. We are so incredibly fortunate to have Amy Burns on our team as our ambassador for the product, and I have had the chance to sit in on quite a few of her sessions where she demonstrates the many reasons for K-5 music teachers to consider adopting MusicFirst Elementary for their classrooms. Amy provides countless examples of exactly why and how she uses this unique curriculum with her students, and over the past two months, five distinct reasons have risen to the top. Here are 5 of the top reasons that you should consider making MusicFirst Elementary your K-5 music curriculum this Fall.
Reason #1 - A Comprehensive, Complete and Easy to Use Curriculum written by Music Educators
MusicFirst Elementary is an extremely thorough curriculum. Believe it or not, the complete curriculum is over 10,000 pages long! Now THAT’s thorough! The curriculum has almost everything, including software, sheet music, high quality audio tracks, animated videos, and much more. If you find something that it doesn’t have, the team behind the scenes listens to teachers and adds it if possible, so it is constantly growing. And it is EASY to use! You can navigate anywhere in the site within two clicks so you’ll never have to wonder how to get where you want to go on the site.
It’s flexible enough to use it either as your every day lesson plans for all grade levels OR as a supplement to a curriculum that you have already designed for your students. You can customize ANY of the lessons. If the middle and high schools in your district already use solutions from MusicFirst, it is the PERFECT compliment to using the MusicFirst Classroom with your middle school, music, technology class, or band class, or orchestra class or choral class, etc.
Reason #2 - Documentation
If your school administration requires you to hand in lesson plans on a regular basis, MusicFirst Elementary allows you to print out ANY lesson in a nicely formatted PDF - something you don’t find with other products. If your district requires you to submit a Scope & Sequence or a curriculum map for your K-5 music program, again, MusicFirst Elementary has all of this information and allows you to print out all of it as a PDF. It may not sound like a big deal, but this is wonderful for a novice teacher, or a teacher who is using this curriculum for the first time.
Reason #3 - the Supplementary Tab
The Supplementary tab in MusicFirst Elementary features play-along videos for the recorder, ukulele, boomwhackers, and other classroom instruments. Additionally, it has all of the Spanish songs that are included in the curriculum in one place for you to easily find. It also has the Kodály Supplementary Songs if you like those as an approach in your classroom. It has quick videos on Musical Elements and Theory - perfect as a mini-lesson or Do Now to set the tone for the rest of the class.
The Animated Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra features the entire animated production of "Red & The Kingdom Of Sound", an award-winning animated adaptation of Benjamin Britten’s The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. The animation imagines Britten’s orchestra as a series of fantastical realms. Red, the animation’s titular character, represents the newcomer to classical music, and the film follows his adventures in the Kingdom Of Sound.
There are 4 full musical productions included with the curriculum. These productions can be used as a performance opportunity with everything you need to teach, rehearse, and perform including scripts, scores, and director guides.
Finally, there is a collection of Musical Games that you can play with your students - either as part of your instruction or just for fun!
Reason #4 - SO MUCH SHEET MUSIC!
One of the absolute coolest parts of MusicFirst Elementary is that there is SO much sheet music included with the curriculum - but not just the melody and lyrics of the songs. Unlike anything that I have ever seen available for elementary music, there are actually band and orchestra parts for MANY of the songs in the curriculum so that students who might play in concert band or orchestra can actually get their instruments out during general music (imagine that??) and play along with with the songs being taught! I LOVE this idea. Instrumental parts are available in Grades 3, 4 and 5 for many of the songs. If you are a band or strings teacher who is also teaching elementary general music, this is the curriculum for you!
Reason #5 - YuStudio
Included in MusicFirst Elementary is a suite of 6 software titles called Creative Tools. This suite of software really has everything you need for elementary music - notation, games, and most importantly, a complete digital audio workstation (DAW) called YuStudio. This incredibly easy-to-use DAW is currently the only product that lets you import a movie so that you can do film scoring with your students. I wrote an article on this blog a few months ago that provides an in-depth overview, so I would recommend checking that out to find out more. I can’t overstate how incredible it is to have such a powerful software title included with your curriculum. This isn’t a toy - it’s the real deal.
The last reason that I wanted to point out is the PRICE. MusicFirst Elementary is VERY affordably priced at $695/year for unlimited users in a school building. The software titles alone are worth more than that if you tried to source them separately. For a complete curriculum with a suite a software, we are confident that MusicFirst Elementary provides everything you need to teach elementary music in a connected world - all at a terrific price. I sincerely hope that you’ll take a moment to sign up for our FREE 30-day trial and see for yourself.