Resource: Carnegie Hall Music Educators Toolbox

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice. Where can you find a wonderful set of resources to help you teach music? The Carnegie Hall Music Educators Toolbox. The education division of Carnegie Hall has created a set of free online resources for K-5 music teachers that includes lesson plans, activities, assessments, videos, and suggested best practices. These resources are divided up by grade level and various musical concepts.

There are two broad categories for grade levels - K-2 and 3-5. When you select K-2, you’ll find 9 lesson plans for 9 different concepts, including call and response, steady beat, movement, and storytelling. Each lesson plan includes aims, standards alignment, objectives and suggested materials. You’ll also find embedded audio examples and videos of teachers teaching the lesson in a real school setting - VERY helpful! I think that the grade level suggestions are spot on and very useful - especially for teachers looking for teachable lessons. At the bottom of each lesson plan are formative and summative assessment forms that can help you document student understanding - super useful too!

Instead of searching by grade level, teachers can also search by concept. There are 8 concepts, including rhythm & meter, tempo, pitch and form. Each concept has 7-9 lessons within and also include embedded audio, videos and assessments at the bottom of the page. Essentially these are the same lessons that are available by grade level, just categorized. by concept instead. There is also an Additional Resources page that has a selection of downloadable PDF worksheets for students to complete.

If you are an elementary music teacher and are constantly looking for high quality resources that include everything you need to successfully use them in your instruction, then I HIGHLY recommend bookmarking this site and checking it out today!