Welcome to music education at Whitman school! What do students learn in music? Most importantly, Whitman students learn how to listen. Listening is encouraged in the following ways:

Students learn to sing tunefully through proper breath support, good posture, tone production and diction. Students sing alone, in small groups, and as a team. Listening to each other is vital in creating beautiful tone.

Students play music instruments: creating and practicing beat, rhythm, and melodic patterns. When different instruments play layers of sound, a higher level of concentration is reached by the learners.

Movement activates the brain! Students respond to cues or concepts involving pulse or melodic patterns. Students respond to concepts such as high/low, long/short, fast/slow, loud/soft and learn folk dances from cultural traditions.

Students learn how to read music, similar to how reading language is learned. They learn to subdivide the beat in rhythm, clapping or playing on instruments while walking the beat and later, read solfege (doh re mi fa sol la ti doh) and note names.

Students write music through first tracing notes, then copying, then listening to a pattern and writing what they hear: rhythmic and melodic dictation.