Alabama Learning Exchange
Alex: A Brief History of Jazz!
A lesson plan that helps learners explore the roots of jazz music and some of the important jazz musicians in history.
National Endowment for the Humanities
Neh: Edsit Ement: Jazz and Ww Ii: A Rally to Resistance, a Catalyst for Victory
Lesson plan that teaches the roles that jazz music and jazz musicians played in the war effort and that demonstrates the effect that the war had on jazz in America.
PBS
Pbs: Jazz Is About Collaboration: Jim Crow Laws: Segregation
Engage your students in discussion about segregation and the Jim Crow laws with this in-depth lesson plan. Using jazz music, you will contrast the ways in which America's most significant contribution to the arts depended on...
National Endowment for the Humanities
Neh: Edsit Ement: Learning the Blues
This lesson plan introduces young scholars to the blues. The origin and development of the blues is explored as well as its distinctive structure.
John F. Kennedy Center
The Kennedy Center: Musical Harlem
The Kennedy Center's ArtsEdge offers a great unit for introducing jazz to students. Its use of Harlem as the "glue" which binds together elements such as jazz history and jazz terminology, makes it particularly effective for the...
PBS
Pbs: Transcending Poetry, Jazz, Rap & Hip Hop
The objectives in this lesson will have learners describing the characteristics of poetry, jazz, rap and hip hop music. Students will also analyze how poetry, jazz, hip hop and poetry reflect the culture of the time.
PBS
Pbs: Jazz and Math: The Beat Goes On
This instructional activity will require students to collect data through listening, counting and timing. They will use ratios, rates, and proportions to report data. They will also demonstrate an understanding of the concepts of rhythm...
PBS
Pbs: Jazz and Math: Improvisation Permutations
This lesson deals primarily with the number of rhythmic combinations that can be found in a four beat measure of music. Students will learn through trial and error and derive a mathematical formula to calculate the number of possible...
PBS
Pbs: Jazz Is About Freedom
One of the objectives in this lesson plan focus on how jazz contributed to the political awareness of the American public concerning lynching. Using Billie Holiday's anti-lynching song Strange Fruit, students will learn about lynching...
PBS
Pbs: Improvise a Short Story
This lesson incorporates the art of improvisation with writing a collaborative short story. Students will learn the relationships music has with other disciplines outside of the arts.
PBS
Pbs: Cole Porter: You're the Top
A high school lesson plan designed to delve deeper into the life of Cole Porter and the meaning in his music.
Yale University
Yale New Haven Teachers Institute: How to Blues
This site has ten lessons to teach about the blues in which students learn the geography, historical events and performers associated with the blues. The unit has been recognized by the American Music Education Initiative as one of the...