The Music Program at Kenneth D. Taylor School
Mrs. M. Buonomo, Music Specialist Teacher
Ms. C. Jackson, Music Specialist Teacher
At Kenneth Taylor School, the music room is a place where every student can be successful because of the many avenues used to explore and discover musical concepts. As students experience singing, playing instruments, movement and dance, improvising, notating, listening and creating, they are developing the skills and knowledge necessary for strong musical literacy.
Quality classrooms evolve around powerful knowledge that works for every student and this is the key to the success of the Orff Schulwerk process – that it is elemental, distilling musical concepts down to their roots enabling all children to become musically independent thinkers and problem solvers. Carl Orff describes “…elemental music as never music alone but forming a unity with movement, dance, speech and song”. As students develop their vocabularies in each of these medias of music, they become increasingly proficient at performing, creating and listening-all of the key behaviours of musicians that make up fluency in the language of music.