Printed from the MusicK8.com Idea Bank

Elementary Theory Word Wall

Submitted by Karen Bray, Austin, Texas

Idea posted 2002-11-22

I have a Word Wall. I saw this done with a third grade teacher's spelling words and thought, why not music vocabulary?

I write music terms on sentence strips and staple them over the chalkboard. For example, I have the word "Pitch" directly over the chalkboard, then the words "high" and "low" above the pitch word card. The words are stacked by categories, such as:

Form (call/response, themes, verse, refrain, ballad, movement, etc.);
Style (march, scherzo, tone poem, hymn, spiritual, etc.);
Harmony (chord, descant, round, canon); Melody (lyrics, phrase);
Dynamics (volume, loud, forte, soft, piano, crescendo, decrescendo, etc.);
Tempo (fast, slow, moderato, etc.)
Dance (tango, polka, conga line, hoe-down, etc.);
Voice (vocal, bass, baritone, tenor, alto, soprano);
Musical (overture, medley)

Well, you see where I'm going with this. As I teach and we talk about music terminology, we just add words and symbols when we need them. Right now, we're working on a guitar unit, so we have Guitar (fret, bridge, string, etc.).

Having the terms right in front of the kids has worked really well! I find the kids referring to the wall when we are discussing music. We are only limited by wall space, because music vocabulary is practically infinite! (My thanks to Ms. Andersen for sparking this idea for me.)