The purpose of this article is to give the history teacher who is interested in or passionate about music--but nervous about transforming that passion into a useful classroom lesson--some resources, tools, and ideas to begin incorporating music into their teaching. It will focus on what is arguably the most difficult musical genre to teach with:…

This article invites teachers to consider how to strengthen links between English, music, arts, and acting, maximizing the potential for children to become successful language learners at a young age. It will show how children's opera can act as a catalyst for learning and using the language. The findings demonstrate that teaching English with a…

Opera is music, art, theater, and storytelling. It resembles many musical, visual, theatrical, and literary forms children have already experienced whether they realize it or not. It is an art form that can reach virtually every child on some level because of its emotional power. It can speak to all types of learners because there are many…

Content-based instruction (CBI) has been part of the foreign language curriculum for many years at US colleges, leading to courses that combine language instruction with specific content domains, such as film, literature, politics, sports and many others. This article presents a rather unusual choice of content domain for a second-year language…

When designing curriculum, the unique characteristics of young, gifted students must be carefully considered. Many have a highly defined sense of justice or fairness, a precocious ability to manipulate language or number systems, a need to see the connections between learning experiences, a heightened curiosity, and an ability to conceive a…

This article discusses how a social studies teacher taught her middle school students about the components of an opera and prepared her students for putting on an opera. The development of the opera and how the opera training related to the social studies, language arts, and music curriculum are addressed. (Contains 1 reference.) (CR)

The Rhodes College (Memphis, Tennessee) History of Opera class collaborated with Opera Memphis to create a documentary on regional opera production, to present online information about Opera Memphis through a World Wide Web home page, and to construct a class home page to be used as a repository for examples of creative writing. The project…

Provides a rationale for using classical music as the basis of interdisciplinary units in elementary social studies. Recommends beginning with a series of humorous pieces to familiarize students with classical music. Includes many examples for utilizing pieces related to geography and history. (MJP)