Education Guide by Paddy Bowman

The goals of this guide are to:

• Deepen students' critical-inquiry and literacy skills, including close reading, observation, listening, note taking, polished questioning, analysis, synthesis, and presentation of research
• Engage students in using primary source materials, such as personal narrative, photographs, and traditional music
• Introduce students to traditional artists whose music and life stories illuminate history and heritage and represent different points of view
• Inspire students' self-discovery, identity, and cultural awareness
• Connect students with big ideas across subject areas

The guide features a unit on each artist profiled in the book and a variety of worksheets that provide scaffolding for an array of approaches for applying the content. Each unit includes background information for educators, student objectives, potential big ideas or themes where the unit might fit, subject areas, preparation, class discussion prompts , suggested activities, a list of student products to use in assessment, a vocabulary list, a short summary of standards, and resources.

The following descriptions of the worksheets show some of the ways that educators may use Everyday Music to enhance their existing curricula.

• Everyday Music Field Notes helps students listen carefully and take notes as they read artist profiles in the book and listen to the three-minute audio profiles on the website. In social studies and English language arts, students may use their notes to look for patterns, compare and contrast, and synthesize information.
• The Everyday Music Image Analysis Worksheet includes aesthetic as well as historical and cultural context elements to deepen students' decoding of photographs, maps, and other images. This worksheet is useful in visual art as well as social studies and English language arts.
• The Everyday Music Songwriting Worksheet outlines how to write lyrics to any genre of song that music educators may want to use. English language arts teachers could use this as a way to study lyrics as poetry as well as songwriting. The social studies educator could use songwriting as a culminating project to demonstrate what students have learned.
• The Everyday Music Interview Worksheet suggests questions that students can adapt to interview people of any age about their musical interests. Social studies, English language arts, and music educators might have different goals for interviews, but students will be learning an array of important inquiry skills and improving interpersonal skills. Like Alan Govenar, who interviewed and photographed the artists profiled in the book, students can turn their interviews into written profiles and illustrate them with photographs and images for class collections to be analyzed and shared.
• The Everyday Music Listening Log will help students listen to music tracks. The log lists musical elements as well as cultural context and regional differences and is useful to social studies and English language arts teachers as well as music educators.
• The Traditions Venn Diagram asks students to compare their traditions and lives with those of the artists profiled in the book, teaching self-discovery, point of view, similarities, and differences. Such comparisons are helpful in all subjects.

Just as ethnographers such as Alan Govenar keep their field notes, photographs, maps, and artifacts in a portfolio, students will benefit from creating Everyday Music portfolios, which provide authentic assessment and give students a place to store all their work. They can use notebooks, accordion files, or back issues of magazines such as Texas Monthly or Texas Highways. Their portfolios can reflect students' main interests as well as goals for what the teacher wants students to get from this unit of study. Students may also use digital portfolios. Students can synthesize their portfolios for a final grade or turn contents into a culminating project.

As students enjoy this journey, they will also discover that their own traditions, music, and stories are part of history and contribute to a dynamic, living traditional culture.