Learning to perform a steady beat from individual pulses, to grouped beats (meter), to beat divisions (rhythm), to short rhythmic motives and ostinati, to rhythmic phrases, to rhythmic compositions.

    Learning to sing in tune from developing vocal fold flexibility, to pitch matching in speaking range, to pitch matching in head voice, to melodic fragments and phrases, to vocal ostinati, to complete melodies, to canons, to parallel harmony in thirds and sixths, to chordal harmony.

    Always sound before sight.

    Activities in each unit are listed from easy, to medium, to difficult.

    Learning from the whole, to the parts, to the whole (Orff-Schulwerk process).

    Music learning from aural/oral/kinesthetic experiences, to applying music vocabulary, to reading and notating music symbols (Edwin Gordon’s Music Learning Sequences).

    Balancing each lesson to include all the activities of listening, chanting, singing, moving, playing, creating, improvising, reading, notating, describing, and evaluating.

    Activities progressing from basic rhythm and tonal skills, to performing all the music elements, to creating, improvising, and notating music.

    Each lesson plan beginning with the familiar, transitioning to the new, and concluding with some type of review.

    Tracking students' learning music skills, concepts, and elements from introducing, to reviewing, to the competency level.

    Learning to discriminate aurally and performing rhythmic and melodic fragments, to discerning aurally and performing the rhythmic and melodic (harmonic) composite whole.

    Units in which the music elements are presented in music sequence learning order (which is also similar to the MENC National Standards order).

    Learning beginning with the 3 lower discrimination levels (Knowledge, Comprehension, Application), and progressing through the 3 upper inference levels (Analysis, Synthesis, Evaluation)--(Benjamin Bloom’s Taxonomy of the Cognitive).