TeachRock

Overview

The Rock and Roll Forever Foundation has partnered with Little Kids Rock to present a series of interdisciplinary lessons. Little Kids Rock is a national nonprofit that trains public school teachers to deliver Modern Band music classes and provides instruments to the schools at no cost.

This innovative series of lessons contextualizes specific songs from the Little Kids Rock songbook. Learning to play a song on guitar, on piano, on drums, or on any other instrument is an experience like no other. It’s powerful. But, by approaching music through a social and historical lens, learning to play a song can become a richer experience still. When the student who learns a Jimi Hendrix song or a Bob Dylan song approaches it as a living piece of history, as a cultural fragment with stories embedded in it, that student can  build a deeper connection to the music.

Each of the following chapters is based around a song and includes Little Kids Rock Modern Band charts and a Rock and Roll Forever Foundation interdisciplinary lesson. Our approach is straightforward. We put the music in context. Every song and every recording belongs to a moment in time. In the lessons that follow, we explore the categories of person, place, and time as they relate to specific songs. This methodology serves as a launching pad, helping to situate a song historically, geographically, and socially.