Men’s Varsity 3 Day Plan

3/25-3/27
Objectives
 Learn more about music theory:
o Chordal theory (four chord sequence)

Same plan for warm-up sequence and theory lesson every day. Give them a bit of the
worksheet every day.
Warm-Up
 Physical
 DRMRD
 Vizo
 Falsetto
 DSDSSFMRD
 Sit on a potato pan
Aural Training Game
 Echo solfege
 Just hand signs
 Neutral syllables
4 Chords Game
 Add some rhythms for the bottom parts
 Have individual students sing pop songs on top
 Have students sing their parts on solfege
o Then numbers
o Then chord number
Rubric
Below I have a printout of a sheet I made. At the beginning of the unit, I had the
students each write their own solfege, note name, note scale degree, and chord number under
the music for every note of the progression. When they did this before the unit, only a couple
of the students even knew what I was talking about, and consequentially most of them got 25%
or less right. Once we had gone through the mini unit however, most of the students scored
100% on the worksheet.

Reflection
This unit was a lot of fun for me. I was always good at aural skills, so this was definitely a
unit that was right up my alley. I think the important part about this lesson is that it helps
understand a lot of pop music these days and how it is built. For students that is something
important to them because they don’t want to just learn music written by dead white guys. This
lesson came about from one of the songs they are doing for their spring concert, the 4 Chords
song. The premise behind this song is a play on the fact that a lot of the famous pop songs
these days are built off of the same four chords. In order to help the students understand the
humor behind that, we designed this series of lessons. They were not long lessons, in fact in the
scheme of the entire lesson, this took only about a third of the class every day. However, the
understanding that they gained from learning the chordal theory made the learning of the song
much easier. The way we played the game during the lessons was that they sang their parts on
a loop through that chord progression. They would sing it on different things like solfege, their
scale degree, chord number, and note name. Doing all of these things helped the students
associate those chord changes to something other than just the lyrics of the song, giving them a
deeper understanding of what they were singing. The additional thing that happened when
students sang this is that I gave individual students the option to come forward one at a time
and sing a pop song over top of the chord progression. This was a fun way for the students to
interact with the material that wasn’t a worksheet. The fun thing about this was that depending
on the song, it was necessary for us to change the rhythm, tempo, and time signature. This
turned it into a fun interactive activity for us to help warm up.