Family Resources
Welcome to Musical Explorers!
This year, your student is taking an exciting musical journey. Musical Explorers is designed to connect students in grades K–2 to the musical community of the Georgia and South Carolina Lowcountry as they build fundamental music skills through listening, singing, and moving to songs from a wide variety of musical styles. In the coming year, your Musical Explorer will meet artists who represent six different musical genres and cultural traditions. Each semester culminates in a live concert where Explorers sing and dance with the artists they have heard in the classroom. In fall 2019, students are exploring Folk music, African-American Spirituals and Hip Hop.
Please visit any of our unit pages (under Teacher Resources) to learn more about the artists and their music. You can be a part of Musical Explorers! Below are some ideas for continuing the journey at home:
Talk about music and community with your student!
Here are some questions to start a discussion:
Who is a part of our community? Where do we hear music in our community?
Have you learned any dances in Musical Explorers? Can you teach them to me?
When are your favorite times to sing and dance?
How do you make music together in your class and in your school?
Who are you looking forward to seeing at the Musical Explorers concert? What song are you most excited to see in person?
Read more about music (with your student)!
Below are some books you can read with your student that are connected with our fall curriculum:
Fall Units:
- Ezra Jack Keats, John Henry
- John Feierabend, The Book of Children’s Songtales
- Susan Kantor, An Illustrated Treasury of African American Read-Aloud Stories
- Donald Crews, Freight Train and Shortcut
- Brian Floca, Locomotive
- Angela Johnson, I Dream of Trains
- Diane Siebert, Train Song
- Jeanette Winter, Follow the Drinking Gourd
- Faith Ringgold, Aunt Harriet’s Underground Railroad in the Sky
- Ed Piskor, The Hip Hop Family Tree
- Bill Martin, Jr. and John Archambault, Chicka Chicka Boom Boom
- Laban Carrick Hill, When the Beat was Born
- Paul Showers, The Listening Walk
Spring Units:
- Monica Brown, My Name is Celia / Me Llamo Celia
- Monica Brown and Rafael Lopez, Tito Puente, Mambo King / Tito Puente, Rey del Mambo
- Yale Strom, The Wedding That Saved a Town
- Simms Taback, Joseph Had a Little Overcoat
- Troy Andrews and Bryan Collier, Trombone Shorty
Learn more about music (on your own)!
Here are some resources that will help you learn more about the music your student is studying this fall:
Folk Music:
- John Jeremiah Sullivan, “Rhiannon Giddens and What Folk Music Means” (article in The New Yorker, May 20, 2019)
- Cecelia Conway, African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia: A Study of Folk Traditions
- Fiona Ritchie and Doug Orr, Wayfaring Strangers: The Musical Voyage from Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia
- Peter van der Merwe, Origins of the Popular Style
- Kaia Kater: NPR Tiny Desk Concert
African-American Spirituals:
- Sarah Bradford, Harriet Tubman: The Moses of Her People
- Nikki Giovanni, On My Journey Now: Looking at African-American History Through the Spirituals
Hip Hop:
- Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation
- Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America
- Ed Piskor, The Hip Hop Family Tree (a comic book series)
- Tupac Shakur, The Rose that Grew from Concrete
- Hip Hop Evolution, directed by Darby Wheeler, Sam Dunn, and Scot McFadyen
- Style Wars, directed by Tony Silver
- The Art of 16 Bars: Get Ya’ Bars Up, directed by Peter Spirer
- Rubble Kings, directed by Shan Nicholson
- Nas: Time is Illmatic, directed by One9
Salsa:
- Celia Cruz with Ana Maria Reymundo, Celia: My Life/Celia: Mi Vida
- Leonardo Padura Fuentes, Faces of Salsa: A Spoken History of the Music
- Oscar Hijuelos, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
Klezmer Music:
- Yale Strom, The Book of Klezmer: The History, the Music, the Folklore
- Henry Sapoznik, Klezmer! Jewish Music from Old World to Our World
- The Last Klezmer: Leopold Kozlowski, His Life and Music, directed by Yale Strom
- Klezmer! A BBC Documentary, produced and directed by Merryn Threadgould
Brass Ensemble:
- Matt Sakakeeny, Roll With It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans
- Patrick Warfield, Making the March King: John Philip Sousa’s Washington Years
Listen to more music!
Check out more parent-and kid-friendly music on our Spotify playlist and the live broadcasts from Savannah Music Festival’s radio archives:
- Mike and Ruthy (2019 SMF Performance)
- Dreamers’ Circus (2019 SMF Performance)
- Béla Fleck & Abigail Washburn (2018 SMF Performance)
- Caleb Klauder and Reeb Willms (2018 SMF Performance)
Spotify playlists
Folk Music
African American Spirituals
Hip Hop