Welcome to Music at SEA!!
         "How is it that music can, without words, evoke our laughter, our tears, our highest aspiration?"
                                                                                                                                  -Jane Swan

The music education program at SEA provides students in Pre-K through Fifth grade with the comprehensive fundamentals of music making. By the time students graduate from SEA, they are integrating and utilizing all of the skills that they have gained in cumulative years to play, compose, and understand music. Dan Rather wrote, "Music is exciting! It is thrilling to be sitting in a group of musicians playing (more or less) the same piece of music. You are part of a great, powerful, vibrant entity. And nothing beats the feeling you get when you've practiced a difficult section over and over and finally get it right (yes, even on the wood block). Music is important. It says things your heart can't say any other way, and in a language everyone speaks. Music crosses borders, turns smiles into frowns, and vice versa."

Beginning in Pre-K, our students are encouraged to expore music in the world around them - from "found sounds" in their daily lives to creating music on classroom isntruments. Pre-K students also discover the concept of a steady beat, setting them up to develop the ability to read and perform simple rhythms in kindergarten.

First Grade students discover how different instruments can produce different sounds, and how these sounds are used to portray literature.

Second Grade students learn the technicalities of music, from different tempos and dynamics to the lines and spaces of the music staff.

Third Grade students begin using the technicalities of music in order to play recorders, as well as collaborate with the PE Department on dance.

Fourth Grade students discover how I and V chords are built in major chords, as well as integrate their Social Studies curriculum with their performance-based musical studies.

Students in Fifth Grade begin creating original compositions using written chords, explore the history of music, play ensemble pieces both on classrom instruments and technology-based instruments, and discover different opportunities for their musical career.

Sweetwater Episcopal Academuy recognizes that performance is a very integral part in a student's musical development. Students in Pre-K through Second Grade perform in both a Christmas and Spring production each year. Students in grades 3-5 perform in a traditional Christmas production as well as take part in Evening of the Arts, an event designed to showcase the many musical and artistic individual talents our student's posses, as well as conglomerative grade-level performance efforts in music and dance.

*Life is one grand, sweet song, so start the music. ~Ronald Reagan

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