General Music Skill Index

As general music teachers, not only are we helping students understand fundamental musical concepts, like rhythm, pitch, and expression, but we're also developing their musical skills, whether on instruments, singing, or composing (and more). Figuring out the best way to teach all those skills in an effective and sequential way from year to year, decide which instruments to teach when for what purpose, and more can be challenging! Here are my favorite lessons, suggestions for sequencing instruction in each grade, and more tips and ideas for teaching these different skills.

First please note that this post is focused on skills rather than concepts- if you want to see my lesson ideas and strategies for musical concepts like pitch, rhythm, expressive elements, etc, you can find those here. Each of these categories has tons of specific lesson ideas and teaching strategies for specific elements within that category- click below to see each one:

Building a curriculum and deciding what to teach when should start with concepts first, but skill development should be an integral part of our curricular frameworks as well. In particular, I think it's easy to get caught up in developing a specific skill, whether that's playing technique on recorder or singing in tune, and lose sight of the bigger picture of holistic musicianship. The skills I've outlined here are broad and incomplete, but I hope they help you think through what to teach when and how to do so effectively, and incorporate each area into the bigger picture of your entire curriculum.