A Lesson About Music to Compliment March Music Madness

I don’t know about you, but I am soooooo ready for March Music Madness! It is one of my favorite ‘seasons’ of the year. Kids are worn out and ready for spring break, so pepping them up with music everyday is a lot of fun.

I will be re-using a previous year’s song list because I am at a new school and everything is prepped and ready to go. My students have never participated in MMM, so why reinvent the wheel?

Something New for 2021

I have always wanted to teach about music to my lower levels, but never had the time to put anything together. We just had a snow week, so I decided to spend some of my free time working on this lesson.

I tried to keep it super simple, have lots of interesting activities, and support what we would be doing with MMM. Included in this lesson are:

heavy scaffolding for the final Smash Doodle project,
a vocabulary tracking page,
a make-your-own-music website,
lots of examples of different music genres,
a couple Jamboards,
an infographic decoding activity,
fun with rhythms,
music as social activism,
a Señora Chase-style listening activity,
and all the student activities are set up for you in a Student Digital Notebook!

What This Lesson is Not

This lesson does not go into deep details. It is a survey-style lesson. I plan to add on to it next year with more details and deeper connections for students.

What This Lesson Is

The lesson is designed to work with March Music Madness or to stand-alone. Here is the TPT link.

Purchase a copy of the Student Digital Notebook here. You can print the pages or assign in Google Classroom or other LMS.

I plan to do a few slides each day of March. I will also allow plenty of time for students to play around with the Citizen DJ website and make their own music, and pretty much take it as it goes. If we get done before spring break, great! If not, we will pick up where we left off upon returning. I’m not going to stress about a timeline this year. We’ve had too stressful of a year to spend time worrying about an artificial deadline. Hopefully, you will find fun activities for you and your students to fill in around your March Music Madness voting.

**This lesson is written by a non-native speaker of Spanish, me! Please let me know if you find errors that I need to correct.**