Charles River School : Music


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At Charles River School, our music teachers develop curriculum with students’ developmental level and classroom themes in mind. Across grade levels, our music curriculum helps students build a strong musical foundation, inspires them to make personal connections to music, and encourages them to understand the importance of music within a given culture as a means of self-expression.

We offer our pre-kindergarten and kindergarten students many opportunities to explore music through singing, movement, and playing simple instruments. Our early curriculum exposures children to many different musical forms and genres, helps them develop active listening skills, and encourages them to express themselves through music. In first through third grades, our curriculum both builds on children’s musical foundation and begins to develop their awareness of the formal patterns and codes in the language of music. During these grades, children create their own melodies and learn to read and write music using formal notation. Our curriculum in fourth through sixth grades addresses the concepts of music as a crucial component of a culture, improvisation, variation on a theme, and the function of melody, harmony, and bass in a piece. In seventh and eighth grades, music is an integral part of our innovative multi-arts curriculum through which students have the opportunity to participate in such activities as hand bells, the production of a musical, and choral singing.

Music at Charles River School is an important element of our integrated theme approach at each grade level. For instance, as part of our third grade’s study, Traveling with Marco Polo, we expose students to folk and classical musical styles of Mediterranean Europe, the Middle East, and China. Children analyze, compare and contrast these different sounds and musical forms through activities and discussion.

Children have multiple opportunities to perform music for an audience as a class, in small groups, and individually through our assembly program and special events such as Winter Festival and May Day.