Here is one topic that is incredibly interesting and very engaging to students in schools, yet isn’t taught very much. The reason? I think its because it is quite simply too much work to prepare.

When researching and beginning the process of putting together these lessons I learned a huge amount about this topic that I didn’t know.. and it took us hundreds of hours work to bring together all the different experts that we asked to contribute. (more about that later!)

However I think the most interesting thing is the facts and figures that you get to learn about and share with your students when teaching this material:

For instance.. did you know:

• That there is a group of musicians in Africa who have been playing together for 1,000 years?
• That there is a country that hosts a parade every year that attracts performance groups numbering in their thousands… with three hundred drummers in each group!
• Which country influenced the modern symphony orchestra by introducing the cymbals, bass drum and bells during the classical and romantic period?
• Which country the guitar came from?, and what cultures it has the most influence on?
• Which famous Rock band in their later career were heavily impacted by Indian culture and incorporated the sitar into their songs
• That there is a wind instrument that is made of wood and is six meters long, used in one part of Europe.

What a gift we will be able to give to our students, if we can share with them this amazing music from other cultures besides our own. It would be a great tragedy if our students were only exposed to one form of music, however, that is what sadly happens in a lot of schools.

I’m not saying that we need to abandon teaching popular music style in favor of teaching about unusual cultures, however what I am saying is that somewhere in a general music students music education, exposing them to world music is extremely important.

As with all our “Printable Music Lesson Plan” modules you can pick and choose what you want to teach, and use them whenever you need.

One terms work on World Music and you’ll share a wondrous world of music with your students. No: they won’t suddenly want to pick up a sitar and spend ten hours a day in deep study of Raga’s – However they will know what a sitar IS, and that’s a gift that you have given them for life!

The Development of this Module….

Before I go on, I have to share with you some of our process in developing this unit of work, because it was somewhat different to our previous modules.

In the past we have found a team of wonderful writers, and we have instructed them to go out and research topics to bring together a fact sheet, lesson planning ideas and a fun style worksheet.

For this one we decided to do something different. We used our mailing list and other methods and tried to find an expert from each country that we wanted to write a lesson on.

We couldn’t find an expert from every country, but we did come close! We found some wonderful writers from India, Indonesia, Brazil, Turkey, Spain and Europe, and we brought them all together with some of our best writers to come up with the drafts.

We then had experienced educators edit the lessons, and we refined the topics somewhat, because some of the lessons were a little too broad and we felt would be better if they focussed on one specific area.

For example, we had a lesson on Indonesian music, and the topic was so broad (given that there is 17, 508 islands in Indonesia, and who-knows how many musical styles!), so we refined the lesson down to talk about Indonesian Gamelan.

We wanted to keep the topics specific and interesting to students in schools, while still providing an overview of world music in as concise a manner as possible.

For every lesson you can use the regular fact sheet,
with key points bolded in a special font. Everything students need to know is there, and we’ve trimmed it down to the most relevant facts.

OR… You can have a “fill in the blanks” factsheet where students will have to fill in key points during the lesson. This is aligned perfectly with the included powerpoint presentations which are demonstrated below.