Music Integration Across the Curriculum

At Detroit Prep, one important part of our mission is fostering a love of learning and passion for exploring and fulfilling their extraordinary potential as learners, leaders, and world-changers. One way that we do this is through integration of music across the curriculum - students work toward the learning target, I can relate my understanding to other subject areas and tie them together for high quality understanding and connections by stating evidence or artifacts.

Research shows that integrating music across the curriculum has a number of benefits, including increasing understanding of other content areas, improving memory, and strengthening coordination and motor skills! For more information, here is a helpful post to reference.

Our Crew has been working so hard to become experts on the expedition topics such as,  “Pollution and Climate Change” for 7th grade,“Chemistry and Cooking” for 4th grade, and “Trees” for Kindergarten! To support integrated learning experiences in music, we have worked on songs that aligned with these topics and deepened their understanding of the key themes of their expedition. Students were introduced to these songs at the beginning of their ten week expeditions. 

7th Grade sang the “We Are The World”, originally by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, 6th grade performed Cells, Cells - A Parts of the Cell Rap, 5th grade connected their learning to Natural Disasters, 4th grade played on the recorder and sang “Hot Cross Buns Song”, and 3rd grade performed a song about Freshwater Biomes. 

We have also been focused on concert and performance etiquette. This includes modeling good performance skills by standing and sitting up straight, singing and playing, and giving their personal best performance.