5 Ways to use MusicFirst Elementary as a Center

If the idea of using centers in your elementary music classroom feels overwhelming, you’re not alone. Many music educators are hesitant to implement centers, often concerned about managing multiple activities, maintaining student engagement, or simply finding the time to set them up. However, with the support of MusicFirst Elementary, these challenges become far more manageable, and the benefits to your students and your teaching practice are well worth it.

Why centers?

Centers provide a powerful, flexible way to engage students, offering opportunities for differentiated instruction and hands-on learning. Instead of whole-group lessons where some students may struggle to keep up while others grow restless, centers allow students to work at their own pace, explore various musical concepts, and develop independence. With MusicFirst Elementary as one of your centers, students can engage with interactive digital activities, reinforcing concepts in a fun and personalized way.

Centers in the elementary music classroom are highly beneficial for increasing student engagement, differentiating learning, promoting retrieval practice on various concepts taught, encouraging creativity, and providing opportunities to assess students during one class period. MusicFirst Elementary enhances these advantages by offering interactive games, listening activities, composition tools, and more, all tailored to support music learning.

Here are five ways to use MusicFirst Elementary as one of your centers in your elementary music classroom:

#5 Decoding Center

Use rhythm grids found in the creative tools to decode simple or advanced rhythm patterns.

#4 Music Game Center

Use the Instruments game found in Supplementary Tab>Music Games to have students match the instrument to the sound.

#3 Understanding Music Center

Each lesson found in MusicFirst Elementary begins with Understanding Music. This 2-3 minute activity reinforces the foundations of music by having students move to the steady beat, listen and echo rhythm patterns, improvise rhythmic answers to questions, listen and echo melodic patterns, improvise melodic answers to questions, warm up their faces, and echo-sing melodic patterns on “la” or solfege patterns.

#2 Create a 4-measure Boomwhacker Melody and Perform It Center

Launch Notepad from the Creative Tools. Pick a grade level and click on “Quick Composition (4 Measures Treble Clef in C)”. In the File>Preferences turn on the note names, metronome, note highlighting, and boomwhacker. Have the students compose a quarter note step-melody that begins on middle C and ends on C, E, or G. Once finished, have them use boomwhackers to perform it, adjusting the tempo when needed.

#1 Create An Ostinato Loop to Improvise with Pitched Percussion Instruments

Launch YuStudio from the Creative Tools. Open the YuStudio app and make it full-screen. Click the Loop button to create a one-measure ostinato pattern using audio loops (you can increase the measures if you would like). Set the key to C Pentatonic and the tempo to 96. Magnify the screen by using the + button and use the Audio>Sounds>Instruments to have the students choose a bass, drum beat, and keyboard in the key of C. Remind them to shorten, lengthen, or loop it to fill the entire measure and to balance the three tracks. Find pitched percussion instruments (set to C Pentatonic) and improvise a new melody using a rhythm chant like Bate Bate. Or use non-pitched percussion instruments to create another rhythm to the ostinato loop.

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