Colorado Academic Standards Online

Colorado Essential Skills:

1. Recognize that problems can be identified and possible solutions can be created. (Creativity and Innovation)
2. Recognize and describe cause-and-effect relationships and patterns in everyday experiences. (Critical Thinking and Analysis)

Inquiry Questions:

1. How does different music change the way you feel?
2. Is silence a part of music?
3. How many different ways can you move to music?

Expand and Connect:

1. Using developmentally appropriate movements to express music demonstrates ability to respond to musical elements.
2. Gross and fine motor skills are refined when responding to music through movement.
3. Expressing music through movement and dance is an important part of all cultures.

Colorado Essential Skills:

1. Communicating a variety of ideas and emotions through performance demonstrates a willingness to try new things. (Adaptability and Flexibility)
2. Accurately recognize one's own emotions, thoughts, and values and how they influence a performance. (Self-Awareness)
3. Articulate musical ideas using different forms of communication to express themselves. (Interpersonal Communication)

Inquiry Questions:

1. How does performing songs help you learn?
2. How does music express thoughts and feelings?
3. How can movement communicate the meaning of a piece of music?

Expand and Connect:

1. Use of nursery rhymes, counting songs, spelling songs, celebration songs, holiday songs, and patriotic songs enables varying ways to teach content skills.
2. Musicality is the ability to perform and respond to music in meaningful ways.
3. Movement can demonstrate the ability to follow musical elements.

Colorado Essential Skills:

1. Evaluating progress through practicing and adapting musical skills to attain performance goals aids in developing musicianship. (Perseverance and Resilience)
2. Recognizing where performance problems can be identified, as well as possible solutions can be created within musical practice and refinement processes, increases critical thinking within a musical context. (Critical Thinking and Analysis)
3. Implementing a variety of teacher provided task and time management strategies through musical practice and refinement processes supports development of high-quality musical products determined by teacher criteria. (Self-Management)
4. Synthesizing information from multiple sources helps to demonstrate understanding of a topic. (Data Analysis)

Inquiry Questions:

1. When is a musical work ready to share?
2. How do individual musicians improve the quality of their performance?
3. Why is it important for the performer to stay focused throughout the performance?

Expand and Connect:

1. Musicality is the ability to perform and respond to music in meaningful ways.
2. Using movements to express music demonstrates ability to accurately respond to musical elements.
3. Music can contain a theme just as a story contains a main idea.

Colorado Essential Skills:

1. Composing, improvising, and arranging help to synthesize ideas in original and surprising ways. (Creativity and Innovation)
2. Composing, improvising, and arranging cause one to innovate from failure, connect learning across domains, and recognize new opportunities. (Adaptability and Flexibility)
3. Creating music requires consideration of purpose, audience, planning, and delivery. (Civic Engagement)

Inquiry Questions:

1. How can music help to tell a story?
2. Where else can you find patterns?
3. Why are patterns important in music?

Expand and Connect:

1. Students can make connections between the personality of a character in a story and how they are portrayed with a musical theme or motif.
2. Students can use technology to create, sample and manipulate sound effects. They can also use the internet as a resource for environmental sounds.

Colorado Essential Skills:

1. Reading and analyzing music increase knowledge and development of musical ideas, as well as musical understanding. (Creativity and Innovation)
2. Writing music allows application of knowledge, making informed decisions, and transferring that knowledge to new contexts. (Self-Awareness)
3. Reading and analyzing music are opportunities to look for and value different perspectives expressed by others. (Adaptability and Flexibility)

Inquiry Questions:

1. How do opposites make music more interesting to listen to?
2. Why is it important to keep a steady beat in certain situations?

Expand and Connect:

1. Demonstrating musical opposites through movement helps to assess one’s understanding of opposites.
2. Demonstrating opposites builds long-term memory and connections to literary and societal opposites.
3. Specific vocabulary is necessary to describe music.

Colorado Essential Skills:

1. Interpreting expressive musical elements provides an opportunity to recognize personal characteristics, preferences, thoughts, and feelings. (Self-Awareness)
2. Using expressive musical elements provides recognition and awareness of the value in different perspectives expressed by others. (Adaptability and Flexibility)
3. Using a variety of expressive elements in music demonstrates an ability to try new things. (Creativity and Innovation)

Inquiry Questions:

1. How can we make songs sound more interesting?

Expand and Connect:

1. Demonstrating opposites aurally and kinesthetically builds long-term memory and connections to literary and societal opposites.
2. Demonstrating musical opposites through movement helps to assess one’s understanding of opposites.
3. Various musical styles (folk music, classical music, marches, and lullabies) can be used to provide examples of same and different.

Colorado Essential Skills:

1. Recognizing musical structure provides a format to describe cause and effect relationships and patterns (Critical Thinking and Analysis)
2. Applying knowledge of musical form and structure allows design parameters to set goals and make informed decisions to learned and new concepts. (Self-Management)

Inquiry Questions:

1. How do voices and instruments sound different?
2. When people listen to a piece of music, what are they listening for?
3. What makes voices and instruments sound different?

Expand and Connect:

1. Ample experiences of "same/different" set up eventual understanding of binary (AB) form.
2. The ability to hear same and different phrases is a foundational skill to developing aural discrimination.
3. Identifying similar themes, patterns, and textures in stories, songs, and art forms provides practice and exploration in how themes/patterns and textures are used in the world.

Colorado Essential Skills:

1. Discerning musical preferences allows individuals to make connections between information gathered and personal experiences. (Self-Awareness)

Inquiry Questions:

1. Why do we choose different music for different events?
2. Why does some music make you want to move?

Expand and Connect:

1. Connecting music to other art forms (painting, sculpting, dancing) provides children with another way to express thoughts and emotions.

Colorado Essential Skills:

1. Experiencing and analyzing music of different cultures helps to identify and explain cultural perspectives. (Global and Cultural Awareness)

Inquiry Questions:

1. Why do we choose different music for different occasions?
2. What causes various instruments and voices to sound different from each other?
3. What makes one genre different from another?

Expand and Connect:

1. Discussing ways that we listen to music in daily life (in the car, headphones, in an audience, on the computer or television) provides a connection to the many purposes and functions music serves in daily life.
2. Providing diverse examples of the use of music in society builds a beginning understanding of the role music plays in individual experiences, family events.