Montague Township School District
Music: Keyboarding Curriculum Guide
Grade 8
2025-2026
Jody Taylor
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Description
Mixed Middle Grades General Music Elective: Introduction to Keyboarding. Students compose, create, improvise, perform, and respond to rhythmic and melodic patterns using voices, classroom instruments, and other activities. Students celebrate musicians through genres including Jazz, Hip-Hop, Spiritual, Classical, Ragtime, and Rap, with awareness brought to Climate Change through chosen songs and performances.
Big Ideas
- The creative ideas, concepts and feelings that influence musicians' work emerge from a variety of sources.
- Musicians' creative choices are influenced by their expertise, context and expressive intent.
- Musicians evaluate and refine their work through openness to new ideas, persistence and the application of appropriate criteria.
- Performers' interest in and knowledge of musical works, understanding of their own technical skill, and the context for a performance influence the selection of repertoire.
- To express their musical ideas, musicians analyze, evaluate and refine their performance over time through openness to new ideas, persistence and the application of appropriate criteria.
- Musicians judge performance based on criteria that vary across time, place and cultures.
- Individuals' selection of musical works is influenced by their interests, experiences, understandings, and purposes.
- Response to music is informed by analyzing context (e.g., social, cultural, historical) and how creator(s) or performer(s) manipulate the elements of music.
- The personal evaluation of musical work(s) and performance(s) is informed by analysis, interpretation, and established criteria.
- Musicians connect their personal interests, experiences, ideas, and knowledge to creating, performing, and responding.
Essential Questions
- How do musicians generate creative ideas?
- How do musicians make creative decisions?
- How do musicians improve the quality of their creative work?
- How do performers select repertoire?
- How do musicians improve the quality of their performance?
- When is a performance judged ready to present?
- How do context and the manner in which musical work is presented influence audience response?
- How do individuals choose music to experience?
- How does understanding the structure and context of music inform a response?
- How do we discern the musical creators' and performers' expressive intent?
- How do we judge the quality of musical work(s) and performance(s)?
- How do musicians make meaningful connections to creating, performing, and responding?
- How do the other arts, other disciplines, contexts, and daily life inform creating, performing, and responding to music?
Music - Connecting
Music - Creating
Music - Performing
Music - Responding
Students apply mathematical reasoning when composing melodies and understanding rhythmic patterns and structures.
Students explore sound waves and acoustics through keyboard performance and listening activities.
Students examine the historical and cultural contexts of various musical genres including Jazz, Hip-Hop, Spiritual, Classical, Ragtime, and Rap from different cultures and time periods.
Students read, interpret, and discuss musical notation, lyrics, and written analyses of musical works and composers.
Students develop fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination through keyboard technique and practice routines.
Students are assessed through formative, summative, alternative, and benchmark assessments including group work, projects, discussion, question and answer, teacher observation, and skill testing.
| Unit | Formative | Summative | Benchmark | Alternative |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01Creating | ✓ | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| 02Performing | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| 03Responding | ✓ | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| 04Connecting | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Coverage | 4/4 | 4/4 | 2/2 | 4/4 |
| Unit | IEP | 504 | MLL | At-Risk | Gifted |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01Creating | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| 02Performing | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| 03Responding | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| 04Connecting | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Coverage | 4/4 | 4/4 | 4/4 | 4/4 | 4/4 |