An Award Winning Music Curriculum

Musicplay is an award winning music curriculum for elementary schools. Musicplay is a sequential curriculum with lessons that follow the calendar year. The weekly lesson outlines the new concepts that will be taught, those that will be reviewed, and include seasonal and holiday repertoire. The planning is done for the teacher!

Important concepts are taught through play. Each week in Grades 1-5 a new singing game is featured. Children love music games. This is a text that will have your students really excited about learning music! The songs and games are chosen to teach musical concepts, to teach children about cultures around the world, and to provide songs for special days and performances throughout the school year. The most important factor in selecting songs for this series is that songs appeal to children!

The Musicplay teacher's guides include audio recordings. Each teacher's guide includes audio recordings with more than 100 musical selections per grade level. Children and adult voices are used, and there are many recordings licensed from popular children’s entertainers. Accompaniments include Orff arrangements, piano accompaniments and orchestrated accompaniments. Performance songs have both performance tracks and accompaniment tracks - you can use the accompaniments only for your performances. Multicultural songs feature authentic performances - the songs are in original languages and are sung by native singers. Many of the multicultural songs are game songs that appeal to children even though the language and sound may be unfamiliar.

The Listening Resource Kits 1-5 provide the most comprehensive listening component of any music curriculum in North America. There are 24-40 examples per grade level. The reproducibles, maps, listening logs and activities are unique and will teach children to become perceptive listeners. Musicplay for Kindergarten and Musicplay for Middle School (Grade 6) include listening selections in the teacher's guide.

The student book for Grade 2-6 is a 60-72 page soft cover book available for about the same price as a band method book. If you have a Smartboard or a computer/projector in your classroom, you can use the new Musicplay PowerPoint Edition to teach the songs and concepts to your students instead of using student books. Our electronic editions feature music that has been re-formatted to fit the screen. Our music is larger and easier to read because we've sized the page to correctly fit on a PowerPoint slide. There are many advantages to using a PowerPoint presentation in the music classroom:

• easier for the teacher to show a PPT than to hand out student textbooks to each child
• visually appealing to children, more engaging, easier to focus students' attention
• text highlights in short songs teach beginning reading in the same way that pocket chart reading activities do
• PowerPoints provide shared reading practice for all grades: Music notation and lyrics only are included
• print space and cost does not limit the length or scope of the presentation - we’ve included more visuals, full color, full vocal scores and lyrics
• easily highlight concepts
• We've included links to websites to enhance learning - on a Smartboard, one click takes you to sites with tremendous interactive possibilities

Music specialists with training in Orff or Kodàly will find that Musicplay works well with either methodology or as an integrated approach using both. 89 Orff arrangements for Grades 1-5 are found in The Orff Source. Orff Source Volume 2 and 3 are also available. The music reading songs are not a separate unit at the end of the text. Music reading songs are presented sequentially in every weekly lesson throughout the curriculum so that the students become literate musicians.

Our piano accompaniments are exceptional. The arrangements are interesting, well formatted, easy to use, easy to read, and very playable. Chord symbols are included and vocal parts are given on a separate staff. Piano accompaniments are available for single songs for use in contest or festival, or for an entire grade level.

Musicplay supports and enhances science, social studies, and language arts curriculums. In first grade songs to teach vowels and consonants are included. The Big Book for Grade 1 is a wonderful early literacy tool. Many of the songs are charted, so that students will develop reading skills while they learn music. Poetry is included in Grades 2-5. Science concepts are taught as well - each grade includes songs that teach about the environment.

Musicplay is a curriculum that can be used by a classroom teacher with limited 
musical training. However, music specialists will appreciate the planning and sequencing that is done for them. Musicplay is used throughout Canada and the USA and in many international schools.

Musicplay K-6 Overview

Grant Applications Are Now Available

At Themes & Variations we are committed to providing quality affordable materials for teaching K-6 music classes. Our Musicplay K-5 curriculum with digital resources is just $1625, however we realize that funds may not be available for it in high needs schools. 

Click here for more information on Musicplay Grants.