Elementary Music Classroom Tour 2026-2027

My elementary general music classroom has had pretty much the same setup (other than covid) for at least a decade now, but this year I had to make some dramatic changes because the screen that I teach from is now on the opposite side of the room! It has honestly been fun to be able to rethink my setup so I'm excited to share a bit more detail about my classroom space than I have been the last few years.

First here is a quick spin around the room to get the lay of the land:

If you want to hear my talk through all of the elements of my classroom in video form, here is a video tour of the entire space with more explanations of each area- I've also written out some of the highlights with photos below if you'd rather read than watch as well.

Here's the view of the room when you first walk in the door:

To the left of the door as you walk in, I've added a small plastic shelving unit next to the ukuleles. I was primarily needing a place on this wall to keep the tissue box and hand sanitizer, but I'm excited to now have some shelves where students can drop their hoodies, water bottles, and other belongings instead of having to put them on the floor! I got 2 of these shelves from Walmart and combined them so I could have 4 shelves instead of 3, and then used the other 2 next to my teacher desk (which you can see in the photo above). The shelving unit also comes with wheels, actually, but I wanted them to be stationary so I just left the wheels off.

This was sortof a "why didn't I do this sooner?!?" moments but I also moved the 2 tracking sheets for keeping track of when the classroom jobs rotate through the color team groups they sit in and when classes get to the top of the black, white, or all piano keys in the classroom management point system, onto the same magnet board where I have the jobs and the piano keys themselves. You can see what my board used to look like, and read about how I made the board itself, in this post. I now have my Kindergarten illustrated learning objectives next to the magnet board as well.

Next to the ukuleles I have the table students use as a writing surface when we're doing a writing activity, with 2 different calming corners on either side. The table also holds caddies of supplies like dry erase markers, colored pencils, and crayons organized by color team. I used to have just one calming corner but I wanted to split the books up into two crates to make them easier to get in and out, and I realized I could set up two spaces for those times when two different students need to separate and take a minute to get themselves together. I also have some posters with different coping strategies and breathing guides, and for the side with the books for older readers I also have a bin with some notecards and pencils so students can write down what's going on when I can't have a private conversation right away, and both sides also have noise canceling headphones that students can use while they're there or grab them to use during class if they need them. You can read about how I incorporated noise canceling headphones for the first time last year as a tool for students who need them in this post.

Next to that is my main classroom seating for 1st-6th grade (Kindergarten mostly sits on the floor). I have the giant grade level expectations posters on the wall behind the chairs, and the chairs are organized in 6 rows of 4 chairs each, marked with colored duct tape on the floor to group them into "color teams" which I use for everything from organizing writing supplies to assigning classroom jobs. 

At the front of the room I have my electric piano and next to that, a table with a rainbow table skirt around it so I can hide the two bass xylophones I have stored underneath. Above that table are the world map and elements of music anchor charts, and next to that are the hand signal posters for water/ bathroom/ tissue on the left side of the screen. On the other side of the screen are the picture frames for each grade where I write the learning objectives for that day's lesson, and the dry erase board underneath that I use for writing the student-generated success criteria as I go through the lesson. Next to that are the "respect" posters and "MUSIC" letter board that I use to keep track of class points, with my music stand that serves as my command center in front of those. 

Next to that is my giant blue chalkboard wall :) I have my solfege posters on the pillar to the left of the wall, and my instruments of the orchestra posters above it. I have a black rolling cart with clipboards, pencils, and erasers, plus bins to keep any manipulatives or other small group supplies I need for that day's lessons, organized by color team, and the bass drum for band class tucked behind the rolling whiteboard. The clear bins on the floor hold my emergency sub plans, and my teacher toolbox is on top of the piano. Next to the piano I have a rolling rainbow drawer set with one drawer for each grade to keep my master copies and any student work or forms they turn in, Next to that is my small teacher work area, and then the boomwhackers are hung on the wall next to that. 

The open shelving wall has hardly changed at all! The only thing I really changed was the labels on the shelves where I write the names of the instruments so that students can get things more independently- you can see a closeup of those in the video tour above but they are just address label stickers. Kindergarten sits on the circle spots you see on the floor on this side of the room, and I use the same spots whenever we are doing a circle activity with the older grades as well- because they have the same 6 colors I can easily have students find a spot that matches their color team to give them some choice without as much arguing over who will stand where.

So that's it! It has been a long time since I wrote a post this long but I hope I've included all the information you may be curious to hear about. If there's anything I didn't cover or that you want to know more about, though, please leave a comment below and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. If you want to use the same rainbow patterns posters that I have in my classroom, you can get printable files for those here. 

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"Together" Theme Elementary Choral Program

For this year's elementary choir winter concert, I've chosen songs with the theme of togetherness. This is a great theme because there are so many possibilities, and it can work well any time of year, plus it is such a great message! I'm really excited about the songs I've picked and they have been great for teaching a range of skills and incorporating a variety of genres and styles, plus I thought I would also share the other songs I considered that could also work well with this theme depending on the performance and students you're working with. 

This year my choir rehearsals are at the end of the day (which hasn't happened in over a decade and I know is going to make rehearsals more challenging), and my 5th and 6th grades are smaller groups, so I'm trying to keep the songs a little less challenging than what I normally take on while still making sure I'm choosing pieces that will help students learn the specific choral skills I'm targeting. Here are the songs I've selected for our winter concert:

Peace Between I found this piece when I was looking for a choral octavo with partner singing and fell in love! It has 3 different verses that get layered together, each in a different language (Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin), with classic texts about peace and unity. I was only able to find an arrangement for mixed chorus but I think it will sound just as good if I have my students sing the one bass clef part up an octave. It has an accompaniment part but I'm actually thinking of doing it a cappella. 

Where We Come From As soon as I found the first song I knew I wanted to do this one to connect to the theme of togetherness. I'm adding an upper parallel harmony for the chorus, and then doing the first half of each verse as solos (probably having students take turns singing 1-2 lines each). The second half of each verse is repeated (where he sings "I done seen things") so we'll do that part in unison each time.

Whatever Walk Off the Earth is one of my go-to artists for pop songs I can arrange for my elementary chorus, and I've had this one saved for a while now. I usually have students sing at least some of the verses as solos when I do pop songs but since I'll have quite a few solos in the other song and the lyrics are easy enough to memorize in this one, I'm planning to do all of the verses in unison. I'll add an upper parallel harmony for the chorus (except for the "when you're with me.." and "bum ba dum" lines that jump around a lot, which we'll sing in unison), and have them do the last part as a partner song with one part singing "bum ba dum" while the other part sings the main lyrics.

Those are the 3 songs I'm planning to do but there were a few others that I strongly considered that I still think would be great options to go with this theme! I was originally thinking about doing a Michael Jackson song because the students have been so interested in his music since the recent movie came out, and We Are the World would go perfectly with this theme. Another Walk Off the Earth song that works well with this theme is I'll Be There- I've done this with my choir before and the students loved it. And it's a bit of a stretch but I really did think about using one of my favorite elementary choir songs, I Bought Me a Cat, with this program as well. Because it adds animals throughout the song it could work with the theme of togetherness, and it's just such a fun song to do! I honestly decided with the other songs we were doing, this one would be too much to learn in time for the winter concert.

I used to say I'm not a concert theme person but after doing 4 themed concerts in the last few years I don't think I can say that anymore! I still think that finding good songs the students will love that incorporate the choral and vocal skills I want to teach them with a variety of genres, styles, tonalities, and languages is the highest priority for selecting elementary choir concert pieces, but when a theme naturally emerges in the process that is a cool bonus! You can see all of the themed elementary choral programs I've put together in this post if you're looking for more great theme ideas:

And if you want to see all of my posts related to teaching elementary choir, from rehearsal techniques to my favorite songs, arranging pieces for elementary choir to my favorite warmups, you can see them all here.

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Making the Most of What You Have

With public school budgets, and music program budgets in particular, continuing to get tighter and tighter, it is so important to be able to make the most of the instruments, equipment, and supplies that we have in our elementary music classrooms. Whether you've got an instrument or item that you inherited from a previous teacher that you don't know how to use in your lessons, or you're looking for fresh ways to use what you have, here are all my lesson ideas to stretch your instruments and supplies to use with a broader range of grade levels, organization and management tips to help make it easier to use those things you were too afraid to give your students, and creative ways to use what you have in ways you may not have thought of before.

I've written quite a few posts over the last year or so with all of my best management and organization tips and tons of lesson ideas and teaching strategies for using various items that are commonly found in many elementary music classrooms, and if and when I write new posts for this series I will add them here, so bookmark this page and let me know in the comments which instruments or supplies you need more ideas for how to use better in your teaching!

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Self-Contained Music Lesson Outlines

It's no secret that routine, predictability, and structure are critical for self-contained music classes for students with special needs. One of the most helpful things I learned from observing other teachers and reading books on the topic of teaching adaptive music was finding some general lesson outlines that work well in these situations that I could adapt to use with my own classes. Once I found some outlines that worked, it made it so much easier to find lesson activities to use in each slot in the outline from week to week to help my students be successful! 

First of all I want to point out that having a general lesson routine in place- especially for the beginning and end of each class- is good for ALL learners. In fact, most of the practices that I have learned to help my students with special needs are helpful for all of my students! So if you don't already have some specific routines in place for all of your general music lessons, I encourage you to put something in place for the beginning and end of your classes. Here is how I start my early childhood/ Kindergarten lessons, here is how I start my 1st-6th grade lessons, and here is how I end all of my lessons.

For my self-contained classes, I develop a basic lesson flow for each class based on their energy levels at the beginning and end of the class (which can depend a lot on the time of day when I see them), what happens in the transitions to and from class, where I am teaching them (sometimes they are in my regular music classroom, and sometimes I need to teach them in their homerooms), and how the students respond to different types of activities and transitions between activities. It usually takes me some trial and error at the beginning of the year to find what works best for each class, but once I find the one that works I pretty much use the same template for every lesson the rest of the year! 

For example I had 2 different self-contained classes last year, and I had slightly different lesson outlines for each: 

Class A

drumming with a track

drumming exploration

movement activities

singing activities

instruments/ notation decoding

closing song

Class B

opening/ welcome song

singing activities

movement activities

instruments/ notation decoding

closing movement activity

You can see I have a lot of the same categories between the two classes, but the specific order, and the beginning and end of class, are different. The main reasons for that were class A was taught in the music room while class B was in their homeroom, class A tended to have students trickling into class while class B everyone was there at the beginning of the lesson, class A had more experience with instruments and equipment than class B, and class B was more verbal than class A.

Within each of those categories in the lesson outlines, I am targeting different musical skills and concepts, and making sure I am changing up the specific activities to help students learn and grow while also keeping some activities the same each time so they always have things that are familiar and comfortable. Generally I would maybe have 2-3 new songs/ activities each week while the rest of the lesson stayed the same, and I would usually repeat the same lesson for both of their 2 lessons per week before changing anything else. Obviously some categories in the outline like movement and singing activities often had more than one song/ activity within that category, so I might keep one familiar song and add in one new one, for example.

I hope this gives you some concrete ideas for structuring your self-contained music lessons, especially if you are new to this area like I was a few years ago! If you want to read more of my tips and resources for teaching students with special needs, click here to see all of my posts on the topic. I have learned so much from some music therapists and educators who have much more experience, training, and expertise in this area than I do, including several colleagues as well as some authors and content creators I highly recommend: the book Creative Miracles by Kelly Surette, and all of the online content from Music for Kiddos by Stephanie Leavell are my top 2 recommendations that have had the most significant impact on my own teaching practice. If you have any other resources to recommend, or questions about specific parts of my lesson outlines or other self-contained adaptive music lesson topics, please leave them in the comments below!

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