This is a great platform to join if you are interested in joining a band, interested in joining an orchestra, if you are about to go into middle school, if you're about to enter high school or if you're a music educator.

Music education advocate Scott Lang has launched a new music advocacy group called Be Part of the Music (www.BePartoftheMusic.com) to provide free resources to school music teachers, administrators, students, and parents. The stated goal of the organization is to recruit new students to school music programs. The free, customizable recruitment and retention materials, which currently include 45 documents and 27 videos are designed to help the community better understand the different ensembles and instruments that are available, along with the positive impact that music can play in the life of a child and the school community.

Find out more at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSfiugQyMl2oFvY0JcOAgOg

What is Chrome Music Lab?
Chrome Music Lab is a website that makes learning music more accessible through fun, hands-on experiments.

What can it be used for?
Many teachers have been using Chrome Music Lab as a tool in their classrooms to explore music and its connections to science, math, art, and more. They’ve been combining it with dance and live instruments. Here’s a collection of some uses we’ve found on Twitter.

Learn how to make waves of all different shapes by adding up sines or cosines. Make waves in space and time and measure their wavelengths and periods. See how changing the amplitudes of different harmonics changes the waves. Compare different mathematical expressions for your waves.

This online exhibit explores the history and development of the electric guitar. It includes information about the instrument designers and the musicians who influenced the creation of new guitars and innovations in their sound. Examples of about 40 different guitars are included with descriptions of each. There is also information on how different types of acoustic and electric guitars operate with the sounds of each available for listening. Finally, addition information, references, and links are included.

My goal was to have my students use critical thinking to discover why some instruments are capable of creating more than one sound and to create a simple instrument based on what was learned. This is CP1.5 in the arts ed. Curriculum. “Create music expressions and contribute to decisions about ideas, sounds, instruments and order.” First we learned about high and low pitches and what those terms mean. After that students looked at the following instruments in small groups: autoharp, boomwhackers, recorder, bells, chimes, and slide whistle. They were given the challenge to find the highest and lowest pitches first and then to discuss how the instrument construction determined this.

Readworks has tremendous resources to keep your children reading over the summer with their Summer Reading Program.

Find resources for Grade 1 through to high school, including both fiction and non-fiction articles for enjoyable summer reading. All articles are accompanied by an answer packet to extend the learning.

Just sign up for an account to access the resources for summer reading. Check out the sign up details and see what’s available at https://about.readworks.org/share-families.html.

This website is all about making music exploration and play super fun for kids of all ages, from kindergarten through middle school and beyond! Kids can find and learn about cool instruments from different countries. They can listen to how they sound and even try making their own at home. Instruments like Australia's didgeridoo, Latin America's box drums, and Africa's shekeres are all there to discover.

Daria — World Music for Children is especially great for kids who speak more than one language or are learning another language. There are lots of songs on the site with lyrics in English, Spanish, Hebrew, Zulu, Yiddish, Arabic, and Quechua.