Grade 1 students at ISB receive two 40-minute music classes every 6-day cycle with specialized elementary music teachers.
In Grade 1, students continue to explore their own voices, and begin learning to fine-tune them, so they can pitch-match simple patterns that the teacher or a classmate sings for them to echo during singing games and songs. We learn that music can sound high and low, and from these initial “high-low” singing games, we learn to locate our first notes on the 5-line staff: “SOL” and “MI”. Students learn to sing, play and compose their own patterns using SOL and MI. By the end of Grade 1, students will also add the notes “LA” and “DO” to their solfege note vocabulary.
Students continue to participate in a lot of creative movement activities. Their locomotor vocabularies now include walking, jumping, hopping, skipping, galloping, running and creeping. They are able to identify the sound signals that indicate each of these patterns, and perform them alone or with a group.
Grade 1 students continue to play non-pitched and pitched percussion instruments to accompany songs and games. This year, they will learn to play solid patterns, (with both hands doing the same thing), but also more complicated patterns such as broken patterns, (playing one hand at a time), and moving patterns, (where one hand moves and the other stays stationary).
Grade 1 students learn about form in music, by studying “The Nutcracker” by Tchaikovsky. We learn about RONDO form by learning the March of the Nutcracker (where one part keeps coming back between contrasting parts) and learn about ballet in general, as an art form, and how you can tell a story through music and movement but without words.
In Grade 1 music class, we’ve moved beyond just the first steps. We’re on our way to becoming independent musicians, composers and ensemble players and singers!