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Why Music Ed?

Your child receives music from a music specialist once a week for 45 minutes. Students received a music education based on the curriculum set by the national standards in music education (M.E.N.C) and the Kuna school district music curriculum. If you believe music is important in your child's education I strongly encourage you to let our principals, school board and our superintendent know how you feel.

Seven Important Skills Your Child Learns By Studying Music-

1) Comprehending-Learning to perceive and derive from musical sounds--for example, to identify a musical theme sharpens your child's ability to comprehend abstractions.

2) Solving Problems-The ability to understand a problem and reach an appropriate solution is one of the most important skills your child can learn. Learning the basics of a musical language such as harmony, or interpreting a work through performance teaches this skill.

3) Reasoning Logically-Applying  particular lessons to other problems and solutions requires sound reasoning. When your child learns to analyze a musical work from a cultural , structural, or historical perspective, or to improve within a certain music style both indicative and deductive reasoning grow stronger.

4) Making Value Judgments- Learning to comprehend, consider, and evaluate in music can help your child make informed decisions in other aspects of like. Discriminating between great and lesser works or justifying musical choices in compositions can teach your child how to make and uphold value judgments.

5) Using Symbols- The ability to use symbols distinguishes the human race among  all forms of life. Learning to read, write and interpret musical notation provides access to a non verbal world of thought and strengthens the use of other symbol systems as well, such as mathematics or language.

6) Conceptualizing- Your child learns to classify and generalize by learning to identify different types and styles of music, to recognize how different cultures use music for personal expression, and to recognize common elements in different works.

7) Communicating-  Perhaps the greatest gift of music is its ability to cultivate our feelings and thoughts through non-verbal means. Being able to express these feelings and thoughts, and to respond to them in others, is part of every successful program of music study and indispensable in your child's total development.

***Why We Teach Music -***-Author unknown

1) Music is a science-It is exact, specific and it demands exact acoustics. A conductor's full score is a chart and a graph that indicates frequencies, intensities, volume changes, melody and harmony all at once with the most exact control of time.

2) Music is a foreign language-Most of the terms are Italian, German, or French: and the notation is certainly not English, but rather a highly developed kind of shorthand using symbols to represent ideas. The semantics of music is the most complete and universal language.

3) Music is mathematical- It is rhythmically based on the subdivisions of time into fractions that must be done, not worked out on paper.

4) Music is history- Music usually reflects the environment and times of  its creators, often even the country.

5) Music is physical education- It requires fantastic coordination of finger, hands, arms, lips, cheek and facial muscles, in addition to extraordinary control of the diaphragmatic, back, stomach, and chest muscles, which respond instantly to the sound the ear hears and the mind interprets.

6) Music is of all these things is art- It allows a human being to take all these dry, technically boring (but difficult) techniques and use them to create emotion. That is one thing science cannot duplicate: humanism, feeling, emotion.