From Question to Public Product
by ACEMM, based on the work of K. Michelle Lewis
WORKBOOK / PLANNER · TEACHER-FACING
Purpose
Turn a meaningful question or big idea into a music-centered project that gives students authentic opportunities to inquire, create, make choices, revise, and share their work.
AT A GLANCE
Best for — Teachers who have the seed of a project but need help turning it into a purposeful sequence of student learning.
Focus — Project-based learning · Inquiry · Student agency · Creation · Revision · Public sharing
You’ll need — A question, issue, story, topic, or experience that could become the starting point for deeper student inquiry.
Connections — PBL · Interdisciplinary learning
WHY CHOOSE THIS RESOURCE?
A good project is more than a collection of activities leading to an impressive final product. From Question to Public Product helps you plan the learning journey: beginning with a meaningful encounter, developing questions, investigating ideas, creating through music, giving students genuine voice and choice, revising the work, and sharing it with an authentic audience.
The goal is to make music part of how students investigate, express, create, and communicate—not something added at the end to make the project musical.
NEED A PLACE TO START?
Start with the question, not the final product.
Write down your big idea. Then resist the temptation to decide immediately what students will make.
Ask instead: What might students genuinely wonder about here? What could they investigate? Where could they make meaningful musical choices? Who might care about what they eventually have to say?
Let the project grow from those questions. The public product should emerge from the learning—not become the reason for it.
Ready to build your project?
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Making Assessment Easy
by Drue Bullington
TEACHER GUIDE · K–6
Purpose
Build authentic assessment into joyful music-making so you can see what individual students can actually do without stopping the learning to give a test.
AT A GLANCE
Best for — Teachers who need practical ways to gather individual assessment data during normal music instruction.
Students are — Singing · Moving/Dancing · Playing Instruments
You’ll need — Materials vary by activity; examples include classroom percussion, barred instruments, recorder, and a simple way to record observations.
Focus — Authentic assessment · Individual performance · Singing · Steady beat · Instrument skills · Musical literacy
The resource includes concrete opportunities to assess things like individual singing, rhythmic accuracy, steady beat, drone performance, recorder playing, and decoding—not merely general participation.
WHY CHOOSE THIS RESOURCE?
Assessment doesn't have to mean stopping the music to give a test. Making Assessment Easy shows how games and musical activities can create natural opportunities to hear and observe individual students while the rest of the class remains actively engaged.
Use the included examples as they are, or as models for designing assessments around the music your students are already learning.
NEED A PLACE TO START?
Choose one thing you genuinely need to know.
Instead of trying to assess everything at once, identify one observable musical skill: Can each student maintain a steady beat? Sing independently? Perform a rhythm accurately? Play a drone?
Then look at an activity your students already enjoy and ask: Where could I hear or see that skill individually?
Keep the music going, observe a few students at a time, and record what you notice.
I like that starting point because the resource itself demonstrates how one familiar game can become an “assessment cache”—with different roles revealing individual singing, rhythmic accuracy, steady beat, and instrumental skills.
Ready to use this resource?
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New Teacher? Start here
Beg, Borrow and Steal
by Lisa Sempsey and Crystal Pridmore
WORKBOOK / PLANNER · TEACHER-FACING
Purpose
Build a practical teaching repertoire by learning from experienced educators, adapting strong ideas, and organizing what you learn so you can find and use it again.
AT A GLANCE
Best for — Beginning teachers and educators who are building their personal collection of lessons, activities, and teaching strategies.
Focus — Professional learning · Repertoire building · Planning · Reflection
You’ll need — A workshop, mentor, colleague, resource, or teaching idea you want to learn from.
Connections — Teacher development
WHY CHOOSE THIS RESOURCE?
You don’t have to invent everything you teach. Beg, Borrow and Steal helps you learn intentionally from other educators: observe strong teaching, ask questions about the thinking behind it, adapt ideas for your own students, use excellent shared lessons as they were designed when appropriate, and give credit to the people whose work helps you grow.
The workbook helps turn all those good ideas collected from workshops, mentors, and colleagues into a usable personal teaching library rather than a stack of notes you never look at again.
NEED A PLACE TO START?
Start with one idea worth keeping.
Think about a lesson, activity, or teaching strategy you've recently seen that made you think, I want to try that.
Don't worry about building your whole curriculum. Capture that one idea, identify what it helps you accomplish, record where it came from, and decide what—if anything—you need to change for your students.
Then try it. Your teaching repertoire grows one useful idea at a time.
ACCESS THIS RESOURCE
Ready to use this resource?
Access the complete workbook through the ACEMM Resource Library.
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