New Releases
lesson:
The Homestead Act featuring Cowboy Songs collected by John Lomax
How did the Homestead Act of 1862 impact growth and development in the American West, and what is meant by the term “crossroads of culture” in the context of the American West?
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Native Americans and Westward Expansion featuring Redbone
What were the experiences of Native Americans during Westward Expansion and how did the U.S. government use music and other aspects of culture to force assimilation on Native Americans?
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Late Reconstruction featuring The Jubilee Singers
Who were the Jubilee Singers and how do their experiences reflect the final years of Reconstruction in the United States?
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Palm Oil – The Environmental Impact
How have palm oil plantations impacted indigenous communities in Indonesia and the global climate as a whole, and how have activists and musicians spread awareness about the issue?
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Early Reconstruction featuring the Hyers Sisters
What did the career and artistic work of the Hyers Sisters reveal about life for African Americans during the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Post-Reconstruction?
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The Origins of Disco
What are the cultural, economic, and geographic origins of Disco and how has the genre been presented, remembered, and represented in popular culture?
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The Transcontinental Railroad featuring Work Songs Collected by John Lomax
In what ways did the Transcontinental Railroad contribute to the physical, cultural, and musical growth of the American West in the late 19th Century?
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Plessy v. Ferguson featuring Bert Williams
Who was Bert Williams and how does his life represent an American experience during the rise of Jim Crow laws and the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson?
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The Water Walker: Indigenous Wisdom and Water Contamination
In what ways do indigenous views of water align with scientific views, and how do indigenous activists use artistic expression to advocate for water protection?
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Bystander Intervention: Making Spaces Safer for Everyone
What is Bystander Intervention and how does it make music spaces and other public gathering places more safe, accessible, and fun for everyone?
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Life Songs Scaffolded Resources
What other projects can students develop to showcase their Life Songs Interview?
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Black Radio and the Civil Rights Movement
How did Black radio empower Black Americans, aid the Civil Rights Movement, and influence U.S. society?
Featured Lessons
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Chicana Punk and the Chicano Movement
What is Chicana Punk, how does it relate to the Chicano Movement, and how did it transform the Punk music scene?
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Brazilian Music and Culture in the United States
What is the influence of Brazilian music and culture in the United States?
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Contemporary Latin Artists and Activism
How are contemporary Latin artists pursuing activism and promoting positive change in their communities?
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Latin Music and Puerto Rican Migration to New York City
What is the history behind Puerto Rican migration to New York City in the 1940s and 1950s, and how did Puerto Rican migration affect American Popular Music?
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Mi Gente: Fania Records & New York Salsa Music
What is Fania Records, and how does it reflect the history of Spanish-speaking Caribbean communities in New York City?
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Westward Expansion and Country Music’s Hispanic Influence
What was Westward Expansion, and what effect did it have on American Popular music?
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Lydia Mendoza: Tejano Life and Music on the Mexico/Texas Border
How does Lydia Mendoza’s Tejano music connect to the history of Texas and the influence Mexico has had on that state?
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Colombian Cumbia: African, Indigenous, and Spanish Roots of Rhythm
What is Cumbia, and how do you play its traditional rhythms?
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Joropo: Music Inspired by Nature from the High Plains of Venezuela
What is Joropo, and how is it inspired by nature?
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Quitiplás: Deep Listening and Rhythm Building with Afro-Venezuelan Bamboo Drums From Barlovento
What is Quitiplás, how does it incorporate the natural world, and how is it an example of polyrhythm?
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ChocQuibTown: Embracing Cultural Identity through Colombian Rap
How can the music of ChocQuibTown, from the Pacific Coast of Colombia, help students express and celebrate their cultural identity through Rap?
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Ciranda: The Brazilian Music and Dance that Creates Community
What is Ciranda, and how can group singing and dancing help us feel like a part of a community?
Lesson Plan Collections
Book 1: Birth of Rock
In the mid-1950s, Rock and Roll slammed into the consciousness of the American people. Whether you liked it or not, there was no denying that Rock and Roll had arrived. It was the first American musical tradition constructed from the many musical traditions that animated life in the 20th century, including Gospel, Blues, Country, Jazz and R&B. In bringing together these musical bloodlines, Rock and Roll also brought people together, from across regions, across race and class lines, and, finally, across oceans. It was the beginning of a historical turn that would change daily life in the modern world. This first...
Book 2: Teenage Rebellion
From its raucous beginnings to the time of its mainstream acceptance, Rock and Roll was youth music. More exactly, it was the music of the teenager. Born of postwar affluence and the increased leisure time such affluence afforded young Americans, the teenager was a thing new to the American landscape. If for some they were an object of anxiety, this had everything to do with the fact that teenagers defined themselves in opposition to the parent generation. Rebellion was a part of being a teenager. And Rock and Roll was an expression of that rebellion and of the growing gap...
Book 3: Transformation
The teenage culture of the fifties and early sixties was the seedbed for the youth-driven counterculture of the late sixties and early seventies. This shift toward a countercultural sensibility among young people was reflected in the music itself. If in the fifties Rock and Roll had been viewed primarily as a popular entertainment, in the period of “transformation” it would come to be viewed as--in its most elevated forms--an Art. In the hands of Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and others, music became a “serious” thing. As young people faced the troubling facts of a war that included them...
Book 4: Fragmentation
For a brief time, Rock and Roll seemed almost to be building its own utopia. In late sixties Rock and Roll culture in particular, the walls erected in the wider world - between the races, between men and women, between nations - seemed to collapse. The record collections of the young Rock and Roll audience often included R&B, Hard Rock, Blues, Pop, Jazz, Country, and more. Free Form FM radio mirrored this eclectic but inclusive approach to music by creating inventive playlists unbound by genre. And, then, as the “Fragmentation” crept in, the old walls seemed to reassert themselves....
Book 5: Music Across Classrooms
Music is a gateway to engaging classroom explorations of all types. The Music Across Classrooms Book contains content for all grade bands and lesson plans for ELA, Visual Arts, and STEAM classrooms. New lessons are continually published!
Partnership Lessons: Music Will
The Rock and Soul Forever Foundation has partnered with Music Will to present a series of interdisciplinary lessons. Music Will 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 Music Will 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...
PBS Soundbreaking
TeachRock has partnered with PBS, Higher Ground, and Show of Force to create materials that bring the eight-part, Emmy and Grammy nominated Soundbreaking series into K-12 classrooms. The standards-aligned lessons are tailored for students in social studies, language arts, geography, science, and general music classes, and feature rich educational resources, including the interactive Soundbreaking TechTools that allow students to experience firsthand the technological breakthroughs explored on screen.
The Beatles
TeachRock has created extensive educational materials to accompany director Ron Howard’s TheBeatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years. Exploring The Beatles as an unprecedented musical and social force, the various lessons expose the profound changes that came with “Beatlemania” and feature clips from the film, along with other multimedia assets.
Sun City
During apartheid, blacks were stripped of citizenship, separated by tribal ethnicity, and forcibly relocated to reservations called “bantustans.” The white minority government employed fear to maintain control, suppressing criticism with unchecked violence, and imprisoning anyone who dared question apartheid in public. The 100th TeachRock lesson plan uses Steven Van Zandt’s Artists United Against Apartheid “Sun City” project as a gateway to an exploration of apartheid and various international attempts to end it.
Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World
The award-winning documentary RUMBLE: The Indians Who Rocked the World tells the story of a profound, essential, and, until now, missing chapter in the history of American music: the Indigenous influence. The standards-aligned TeachRock RUMBLE lesson plans can help you bring that story into the classroom. Drawing on short clips from the film, troves of source documents, archival photos, and journalism, the TeachRock RUMBLE lessons introduce students to important Native American musicians including Link Wray, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Salas, Redbone, Buffy St. Marie, Robbie Robertson, and the Black Eyed Peas' Taboo. The materials require students to engage in thoughtful discussion...
The Music that Shaped America
TeachRock is proud to present The Music that Shaped America, a lesson collection that draws on the rich archive of Alan Lomax’s Association for Cultural Equity, enlivening American history of the 18th through early 20th centuries with the sounds of regional folk musics and the personal stories of its performers. A musicologist, writer, producer, singer, and talent scout, Alan Lomax was above all else an advocate for working class people. Feeling that it is “the voiceless people of the planet who really have in their memories the 90,000 years of human life and wisdom,” Lomax dedicated his life to recording,...
CNN Soundtracks: Songs that Defined History
Soundtracks: Songs that Defined History, from executive producer Dwayne Johnson, Show of Force and CNN Original Series explores the music tied to pivotal moments in history. From the March on Washington to the riots at Stonewall – every episode illuminates how music has played an integral role in celebrating, criticizing, and amplifying these seismic events in our collective history. TeachRock has partnered with CNN and Show of Force to offer a collection of standards-aligned contemporary history lessons to accompany this eight-part CNN series. See a CNN Soundtracks lesson in action at East Side Community High in New York, NY here!
Long Strange Trip: The Untold Story of the Grateful Dead
The potent mix of musical, literary, scientific, and philosophic influences from which the Grateful Dead sprang made them, in some ways, the most American band. As such, the Grateful Dead’s story creates an exciting window through which students can explore key people, times, places, and issues of the U.S. throughout the latter half of the 20th century. Created in partnership with Amazon Films, the seven lesson plans in the Long Strange Trip: The Untold Story of the Grateful Dead collection create a pathway through which K-12 teachers of all disciplines can use clips from the film, historical documents, and other...
LADAMA: Movement, Music, and Community in South America
LADAMA: Movement, Music, and Community in South America gives elementary school students the opportunity to explore the performing arts, culture, and ecology of Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil. With interactive instruction from the members of the group LADAMA, students sing in Spanish and Portuguese, perform traditional dances, and learn the underlying rhythms to musical styles throughout South America. In addition, each lesson offers a variety of worksheets and classroom activities to introduce students to South American history, culture, and ecology. Learn more about what the lesson collection has to offer below:
Segregation and Integration in Asbury Park
TeachRock’s lesson collection “Segregation and Integration in Asbury Park” provides educational materials for the film Asbury Park: Riot, Redemption, Rock & Roll. In this three-part lesson collection, students discover the impact the city of Asbury Park has had upon the history of American popular music, and investigate the local conditions that led to the emergence of artists such as Steven Van Zandt and Bruce Springsteen. More than this, the lesson collection asks students to think of Asbury Park as a case study for the racial dynamics in the United States. By watching clips from the documentary, examining interviews with local...
Math and Music: Algebra Featuring Mickey Hart
Math and Music: Algebra Featuring Mickey Hart is a four-lesson unit aligned to 7th - 9th grade standards and designed to fit most algebra classrooms. Through a variety of hands-on activities, algebraic calculations, and graphing exercises, students discover the physical principles of sound waves, the mathematics behind tuning and harmony, and the ways sound and music are measured using mathematics. Check out the Math and Music: Algebra Featuring Mickey Hart Unit Plan here! Learn more about what the lesson collection has to offer below:
Elementary School
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How to Study Rock and Roll
How can teachers help students analyze and understand Rock and Roll?
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Thematic Lesson: Love Songs
Why is the Pop song such a common medium for expressing feelings about love, and how do individual songs relate to their historical moments?
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Muddy Waters, the New Kid in Town
How did Muddy Waters’ music change after he moved to Chicago, and what does that say about the relationship between place and self-expression?
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Designing an Electric Guitar with Shapes
How can shapes be used to design an electric guitar?
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Exploring Shapes in Pablo Picasso’s “Guitar, Sheet Music, and Glass”
What shapes did Pablo Picasso use to create his piece Guitar, Sheet Music, and Glass and how can similar shapes be used to create other instruments?
lesson:
Feeling the Vibrations
How did the Grateful Dead make their concerts more accessible to the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) community?
Student Edition:
Design An Electric Guitar With Shapes
Student Edition:
Celebrating Community With Art
Student Edition:
The Latin Rhythms of “Despacito”
Student Edition:
Cleaning Up the Plastic Beach
Student Edition:
Who Is Ritchie Valens?
Student Edition:
Who Is Camila Cabello?
Middle School
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Female Singer-Songwriters in the Early 1970s
What did the success of the female Singer-Songwriters of the early 1970s reveal about the changing roles of women in the United States?
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The Blues: The Sound of Rural Poverty
How do the Country Blues reflect the challenges of sharecropping, racial injustice, and rural poverty in early 20th-century African-American life?
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Mainstream Metal, Parental Advisories, and Censorship
How was Heavy Metal involved in the 1980s controversy surrounding the creation of parental advisories for “offensive” music?
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The Emergence of Grunge
What was Grunge and where did it come from?
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Punk as Reaction
How was Punk Rock a reaction both to the commercialization of Rock and Roll and to the social climate in late 1970s Britain?
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Folk Music, Rock and Roll Attitude
How did Bob Dylan’s early experiences with Folk and Rock and Roll music influence his songwriting?
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How to Study Rock and Roll
How can teachers help students analyze and understand Rock and Roll?
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Rock and Roll Goes to the Movies
How did movies help to introduce Rock and Roll culture to mainstream audiences in the 1950s?
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Dylan as Poet
How did Bob Dylan merge poetry with popular music?
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The Musical Roots of the Surf Sound
What is the Surf sound and where did it come from?
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Gospel Music and the Birth of Soul
How did Gospel influence American popular music?
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The Who’s Generation
How did the Who represent “My Generation” in mid-1960s England?
High School
lesson:
The Rise of Disco
How did Disco relate to the sentiments and social movements of the 1970s?
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Female Singer-Songwriters in the Early 1970s
What did the success of the female Singer-Songwriters of the early 1970s reveal about the changing roles of women in the United States?
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Dancing the Twist on Television
How did teen dance shows and the Twist influence American culture?
lesson:
The Rise of the “Girl Groups”
Were the Girl Groups of the early 1960s voices of female empowerment or reflections of traditional female roles?
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The San Francisco Scene, 1967
Why did nearly 100,000 young people descend upon San Francisco in 1967 for a “Summer of Love"?
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The Blues: The Sound of Rural Poverty
How do the Country Blues reflect the challenges of sharecropping, racial injustice, and rural poverty in early 20th-century African-American life?
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Mainstream Metal, Parental Advisories, and Censorship
How was Heavy Metal involved in the 1980s controversy surrounding the creation of parental advisories for “offensive” music?
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The Roots of Heavy Metal
What are the musical and cultural roots of Heavy Metal?
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The Emergence of Grunge
What was Grunge and where did it come from?
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The Rolling Stones: Giving America Back the Blues
How did the early Rolling Stones help popularize the Blues?
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Punk as Reaction
How was Punk Rock a reaction both to the commercialization of Rock and Roll and to the social climate in late 1970s Britain?
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Folk Music, Rock and Roll Attitude
How did Bob Dylan’s early experiences with Folk and Rock and Roll music influence his songwriting?
All Ages
lesson:
Thematic Lesson: Love Songs
Why is the Pop song such a common medium for expressing feelings about love, and how do individual songs relate to their historical moments?
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The Evolution of Sound Recording
How did multitrack recording technologies enable musicians to create a form of music that could only be realized in the studio?
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The Beatles and American Segregation
How did the Beatles take a stand against segregation while touring America? And what did it mean for popular music culture?
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Sound Waves, Analog Synthesis and Popular Culture
How did synthesizers allow musicians to create new sounds and how did those sounds reflect American culture throughout the 20th century?
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“Here”: Managing Peer Pressure and Anxiety
In what ways does Alessia Cara’s “Here” defy popular music conventions, and what does the song say about peer pressure in youth culture?
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Heroes and Mortals in “Something Just Like This”
Who are the gods and superheroes referenced in “Something Just Like This,” and what are the connections between them?
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“See You Again”: How We Mourn with Music
How does music help us remember people we are close to, or those we have lost?
Student Edition:
Design A Distortion Pedal
Student Edition:
Drawing To Music
Student Edition:
“Lean on Me”: Expressing Gratitude and Care with Music
How does Bill Withers’ “Lean on Me” express gratitude and the importance of mutual care?
Student Edition:
Loudspeakers, PA Systems, and the “Wall of Sound”
