As a parent, you should expect your children’s school music program to adhere to certain standards. Once you have created a musical environment in your home to stimulate interest, it’s up to the teacher to continue the process. Yet how can you judge the quality of a school’s music program? There are three ways to tell if the school your young children attend does a good job of exposing them to music:
By the time your children reach elementary school they should have regular (more than once a week) music instruction from a qualified teacher. Ideally, music education should be made a part of other subjects like social studies, language skills, and art. And it should be sequential, with each year’s curriculum building on what children learned the previous year. This will allow them to reach new levels of achievement through new challenges. By 4th grade, or middle school at the latest, your children’s school should offer them the opportunity to sing in a choir or other ensemble, and the chance to take instrumental music lessons in connection with a small ensemble, preferably one that includes strings, brass instruments, and woodwinds. The National Standards for Arts Education sets out voluntary standards for music education for grades K-12. These describe what every student should know and be able to do in dance, theater, and the visual arts, as well as music. They were prepared by professional arts educators to help implement the reforms contained in the national education standards.
