Music
Music instruction at Arbor is based on the philosophy and teaching practices of composers Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman. Orff-Schulwerk invites an active, multi-sensory approach to music making through the integration of movement, singing, wordplay, and instruments. Arbor students enjoy two or three music periods every week, as well as singing frequently in class groups and at school assemblies. Primaries and Juniors launch a voyage of musical exploration that builds interest and skill, mining favorite chants and rhymes for rhythmic and melodic patterns to extract, read, play, and notate. At the Intermediate level, study of the soprano recorder adds a wind instrument timbre to our music making, and children grow in independent musicianship through home practice and learning to read from a score. Music has its own skills, history, masterworks, and vocabulary to study, which weave through Arbor's music program K-8. Integration with academic Theme work and Senior Humanities deepens and enriches classroom studies: students might learn cowboy ballads as they study westward expansion in America or augment a unit on Ancient Greece with traditional circle dances and instrumentation. Seniors enjoy workshops in drumming and marimba during their African studies. Throughout the grades, students arrange and perform their own orchestral compositions for dramatic productions and school-wide celebrations like Winter Solstice.