Kansas Music Standard #2: The teacher of music has skills in improvising melodies, variations and accompaniments.

Knowledge

• The teacher understands how to perform written accompaniments on the music keyboard or chord instrument and how to transpose accompaniments to appropriate keys.

Performance

• The teacher improvises accompaniments that are stylistically appropriate.
• The teacher improvises original melodies in a variety of styles, over given harmonic progression each in a consistent style, meter, and tonality.
• The teacher uses resources to illustrate and teach improvisation.
• The teacher performs simple accompaniments appropriate for classroom use.
• The teacher transposes on musical instruments at sight.

Improvising and transposing is an important skill for teaching music and performing it.  In teaching elementary music it is necessary to be able to transpose, improvise and harmonize.  Educators should know how to transpose songs into keys that are within the range that is appropriate for the child voice.  Having children sing in inappropriate ranges can hinder the development of their voice.  Music educators need to also be proficient in improvising harmonies for accompaning songs.  Being able to accompany songs gets students involved and excited about music because they are experiencing music live and not from a CD.

Artifacts

-Improv Lesson

This is a lesson plan I have written for an improvisation lesson for the elementary music classroom.  This lesson plan demonstrates my ability to write an elementary appropriate improvisation lesson.  It utilizes improvising with a recorder accompanying a fok song.

Improvisation Lesson Plan

-Piano Improv

This artifact is a video of myself playing an improvised piano accompaniment to "Come Through in a Hurry".  This artifact shows my ability to improvise chordal accompaniments to folk songs.  

Piano Accompaniment Improvisation