Tom Rudolph’s latest post is about the Worksheet Creator in Sibelius 4 and later. He says:
If you are a Finale user, you might want to purchase a copy of Sibelius just to have access to these worksheets. Finale has a few helpful worksheets, but I think Sibelius has enough to make it worth the cost of the software for the worksheets alone.
It’s always great to hear this kind of feedback, particularly from a respected educator like Tom Rudolph. You wouldn’t believe the amount of work that goes into something like producing 1700 ready-made resources for teaching, and it’s great to have their value recognised.
We worked with Mary Elizabeth, a Vermont-based author and educator, who was crazy enough to agree to do a survey of the seconday music curricula in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Over the course of several months, she established the common factors between these highly disparate curricula, and then established a common set of terminology that could be used to describe the elements of music theory and notation used by them.
Having done that, she set about designing the actual activities that became the hundreds of different naming, matching, evaluating etc. worksheets. She also found copyright-free texts that can be used as stimuli for composition or improvisation, and hundreds of pieces of repertoire, from keyboard music to nursery rhymes to folks songs from different cultures around the world.
On top of that, we worked with a handful of specialist music advisers here in the UK to add a sprinkling of targeted projects suitable for KS3 and GCSE music.
The result is a rich and varied resource for teachers of secondary music, which is often overlooked amidst all of the other amazing things that Sibelius can do for educators. If you have Sibelius 4 or later, check it out, and follow the links in Tom’s post to find out more. If you don’t currently own Sibelius, grab the demo today — it includes a handful of the worksheets from the full program.