LESSON PLAN

Class: Eagle Rock Middle School Intermediate Orchestra

Date: ___10/11/16_____

Announcements: Concert reminder (10/25/16).

Practice logs due (10/17/16).
Outcomes / Standards: Roles in society
Core Music Standard(s): 6-8.Mu.2.2.1 Discuss the roles of professional and
amateur musicians in society.
Students will talk about the importance of all roles in society and music.
Warmup Procedure: C major scale 2 octaves

Fundamentals: Intonation, Articulation

Error Prevention: finger patterns - address high/low 2nd finger
Model on own instrument emphasize differences
New Concepts / Vocabulary: Staccato, Tenuto, best friend
Composition

Items to Address
(ensemble, techniques, measures, connections)

Concert March

Watch carefully for intonation and tempo

Outcomes:

Students will identify roles in society.

Students will identify roles in music.

Questions to ask:

What do you want to be when you grow up? Who is my best

friend in this passage? Whose role is most important?

Assessments:

Stop the students at various places in the music and have

them decide important factors such as the roles of each
instrumental section at that point and how to bring them out

Time
40 min

LESSON PLAN
Composition

Items to Address
(ensemble, techniques, measures, connections)

Time

(dynamics, articulations, group balance, etc.).

After playing a passage, have the students identify which
other instrumental section has a similar role to their own and
how they can work together to get the musical effect across to
the audience.
Performance cross-sections: All students wearing
black/boots/glasses/etc.
Rehearsal:

Start at the beginning

Workshop 4-bar phrases draw their attention to roles in each
phrase, let them define the roles.
Have them decide who their best friend is in each phrase.
After reaching measure 32, run the piece up to that point
several times, giving multiple opportunities for students to get
things right.

Followup / Assignments: Add metronome to practice logs, mark with a red M if they did
practice with a metronome.
Reflection (What worked and what didnt work today?):
We had a great discussion about roles in society. I asked them to each tell the
class what they wanted to do when they grew up, and they were happy to share - as this
class always is! We talked about how each of those jobs was important in society, each
one contributing to a better community whether or not it actively included music. We
also talked about how music itself is an example of society, with jobs and roles and how
every member of the ensemble is important. The class really enjoys talking and it was
sometimes difficult to rein them in, but they are good kids and helped to get each other
back on track.
The warm-up went okay. The students are great at defining musical terms, but
there is such a wide diversity in technical skill among them that actually applying the
right articulations to the scale was difficult. A couple of the students in the back seemed
to have trouble hearing the differences in articulations even when myself and other
students demonstrated them perfectly.

LESSON PLAN
In our rehearsal we took plenty of opportunities to pause and figure out what the
role of each instrumental section was. Some of the students were very adept at
determining what each other section in the class was doing, but most students needed
to stop and listen to another section play in order to decide. As usual, they seemed to
enjoy the randomized performance cross-sections, with just a few students from each
section playing at a time and all the others listening carefully.