Study 26 Composers in a Year with “A Young Scholar’s Guide to Composers” (Day 15)

Study 26 Composers in a Year with A Young Scholar’s Guide to Composers

[Today’s article was written by Gena Mayo and is part of the 31 Days of Music in Our Homeschool Series.]

If you are looking for a thorough music appreciation course that will take you through 32 lessons studying 26 composers, you’ll definitely want to take a look at A Young Scholar’s Guide to Composers from Bright Ideas Press (the Mystery of History people!). It was written by Melissa E. Craig and Maggie S. Hogan.

What you’ll find are lengthy biographies (which take about 15 minutes to read aloud), review questions, easy-to-use maps, note-taking pages, listening suggestions, and even intricate coloring pages. You can download a nice long sample to see what’s available.

The introduction explains exactly how to teach using this curriculum. They recommend spending 3 days on each lesson. You’ll listen to the musical pieces each day and do written activites for the first 2 days.

All four musical eras are taught (Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Modern) as well as lessons on Ancient Music to the Middle Ages and Music in the Renaissance. Listening suggestions are included for each lesson. Here are few of the composers you’ll study: Vivaldi, Handel, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Verdi, Brahms, Debussy, Joplin, Ives, Gershwin, Copland, and John Williams.

One thing about this program I really like are the Composer Info-Cards. These would be nice to laminate and use as flashcards, for a review game, or in a lapbook. There are two games included–Composer Bingo and Composer Jeopardy!

The coloring pages are also so well done. I have several kids who will love these!

Other features of the curriculum include reproducible composer illustrations, a reproducible timeline, a mapping exercise (with maps of Europe and USA), folderbook directions, a composer resource list, useful websites, lesson answer keys with not-taking pages, a glossary, and a certificate of completion. This is truly a thorough curriculum!

If you have used A Young Scholar’s Guide to Composers, leave a comment telling us how you liked it!

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