I've been sharing my favorite ways to recognize Music In Our Schools Month® (MIOSM®) for over a decade now, and each year I do things a little differently. In today's post I'm sharing the full list of everything I have planned for MIOSM® 2025 in my school- everything from in-class activities to school-wide March Madness song brackets and more. I can't wait!
Rhythm Battle: Music Class Activity #1 (K-6)
I do several special activities and contests during music class in the month of March to celebrate Music In Our Schools Month, and the one I've been doing with every class, every grade, every year that I've taught (approaching 2 decades!) is the Rhythm Battle! And my students still look forward to it every year.
We start class with this each time they come to class. They sit down, I start the music, and I put up a slide on my projector that says "Rhythm Battle!". When the intro is ending, I count off 4 beats and click to the next slide on "four". There is a 4-beat rhythm on that slide. If the class claps it correctly, I click to the next 4-beat rhythm slide on the 4th beat, and they have to continue clapping with no pause. They keep going until they make a mistake. When they mess up, they go back to the first slide and start over. Whatever their longest run is before the song ends, that is their class score for the day. I have a score board for each grade so we keep track throughout the month, and the class with the highest total score at the end of the month wins. If you want to see the slides I use, you can get them here.
Disco Duel: Music Class Activity #2 (K-3)
This is another music class activity I've been doing my entire teaching career! I used to do this one with every grade as well, but a few years ago I came up with a different game that I do with my older students, so now it is reserved for just my K-3 classes (although sometimes my older students ask for it too, and I save it as a reward activity if they finish everything else they need to do and we have some extra time left). Cards with the name of a movement (like "cowboy", "DJ", or "hop"), along with a matching picture, are on the whiteboard in a few columns (I usually do 3-4 columns). Before we try it the first time, I teach them the movements for each- they are all movements that can be done with the beat. The last card is always "boogie", which is free dance- students make up their own. To play the game, students perform each movement for 8 beats, reading from the left column, top to bottom, with the beat of the music that I play. BUT I start each group at a different time (I relate it to a canon for older students), so that when the first group finishes the first column, the second group starts. When all the groups finish, I pick the winning team that did the best job of performing the moves correctly and staying on the beat for the correct number of counts. I've updated the movement cards- you can get them here if you're interested.
Melody Match: Music Class Activity #3 (4-6)
This is the newest addition to my MIOSM music class activities lineup and my older students actually take this very seriously! The basic idea of Melody Match is to see how many note letter names the class can identify in one minute. Depending on the grade it might be just treble clef on the staff, adding ledger lines, or treble and bass clef- this could even be done with solfege. A note comes up on the screen and I call on 1 student to name the note. They get one chance- if they're right the class gets a point and I pull up a new note, if they're wrong I go to the next student and continue until they get it right (or the timer ends). The total number of notes they identify correctly in one minute is their class score for that day, and they try to improve their score each time they have music class during the month of March (you could also do this like the way I run Rhythm Battle, and make it a competition between classes within each grade to see which class can get the highest total score).
School-wide March Madness Song Bracket
I started doing a March Madness- style bracket with songs tied to the national theme for that year's MIOSM a few years ago and it has been a huge hit in my building! I go into detail about how I set everything up and run it in this post, but basically each class votes every day in their homeroom, and the song that gets the most classes' votes goes on to the next round. We play the winning song from the day before in the lobby where all the students enter in the morning and announce it on the morning announcements each day as well. I am super excited about this year's bracket- I am doing songs that are a fusion of 2 or more musical genres (to tie in with this year's theme of "United through Music")! You can find the full list of songs for this year's bracket, plus a free template to set up voting in google slides, in this post.
This year I am also planning to get the staff involved by giving them the list of songs in advance and having them predict which song will be the winner. Whoever guesses the winning song correctly gets a prize!
What are your plans for Music In Our Schools Month® this year? I really think this is the perfect opportunity to celebrate the importance and joy of music education, and there are so many great ways to do that without making your life miserable with things that are too much work. I'd love to hear other ideas you're trying this year in the comments below, and let me know if you have any questions about the things I'm doing! If you want to see all the other things I've done over the years, here are all my posts on the topic.
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