Word walls are fundamental to good teaching. They provide students with appropriate vocabulary to discuss a subject in a meaningful manner. And they are a constant visual to help students organize their thoughts.
Music word walls are often a challenge because there are many ways to organize musical concepts and music vocabulary. I approach it from a standpoint of organizing the words by concept or subject. So all the tempo words are grouped together on a “Tempo” word wall poster and “Dynamics” words like loud and soft are on another poster. This gives visual separation to the music qualities, especially the expressive qualities, which I have found the young students have trouble with – my little ones confuse loud and soft with high and low all the time. A word wall will help them distinguish the correct vocabulary to describe what they hear or what they want to hear in a piece of music.
The National Standards for Music Education call for students to be able to describe music with appropriate vocabulary and a word wall aids your students in being able to do this successfully.
As the school year winds down, many teachers are already thinking about the next school year and what they will change and do differently. I hope you consider implementing a word wall in your classroom, if you have not already done so. I have some word wall posters I have already created that you can download, print, enlarge, mount, laminate, and hang. Easy peasy instant word wall!
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