Selecting appropriate materials for the classroom is one of many challenges elementary music teachers face. Working with multiple grade and skill levels in itself isn’t an easy feat. Toss in the national standards, assessment, and No Child Left Behind, and the complexities mount. What’s a busy teacher to do? There simply isn’t time to review and research everything out there, so let the editorial department at Pepper make it easier for you!
When you visit our home page jwpepper.com, visit the newly improved Music Classroom page specifically for classroom music teachers. It’s not so simple to categorize the wide variety of materials that classroom music teachers enjoy, but we think we’ve hit on something that will become a truly significant resource. Our tabs correlate to the National Standards, the critical signposts teachers use to design a comprehensive curriculum.
What do you want to teach your students?
To Sing: Explore song collections, musicals and revues of all kinds, as well as materials to help students learn to sing their best.
To Play and Improvise: Expose kids of all ages to making music with instruments such as guitar, recorder, or percussion in varied styles.
To Read and Write Music: Help your students move from identifying musical symbols to teaching the basics of music writing and arranging.
To Listen: Teach kids to recognize the sounds and the composers of music of all types — classical, pop, jazz, and more.
Music, Curriculum and Culture: Incorporate math, history, science, art and more into your music classroom.
For everything else, we have a tab called Classroom Solutions, which includes these (and more):
- Board games, card games, and puzzles
- Dance and creative movement materials
- Games using props such as bean bags, scarves or parachutes
- Posters, rugs, and bulletin board materials
- Folders and music achievement certificates
- Assessment tools
- Whiteboard materials
- Texts and DVDs to inspire the music educator
As you select an area of interest, you can browse through all titles in a category, or you can narrow your results further. A new filter, called “Difficulty,” allows you to search for materials by grade level. Do you need a fun song collection to start out the year for second and third grade, or a general musical for your fifth and sixth graders? No problem!
We’re also working on providing you more information in our listings to give you a clearer sense of the product. This will prevent you from wasting your valuable budget on shipping charges to see if the music will work for you. If you do need to return something, though, no worries! Your purchase is 100% guaranteed. If you can’t use it, you may return it, no questions asked.
Like our customers, we are continually striving to improve what we do, and our Classroom page is no exception. Since we’ll be tweaking this area of our site in the weeks and months to come, we hope you’ll stop by often! As always, we welcome your feedback and hope you have an energizing school year!
