Zeezok Music appreciation for the music inept

Ages and ages ago when I was a teacher I played classical music in my classroom.  It was a CD of Peanuts Beethoven music, I played it all the time in my classroom.  So, I know the importance of music appreciation, and I know how helpful it is in your studies, but I don’t really have a clue how to teach it.

I’m musically inept.  I can sing along to music, I can recognize songs, but I don’t have a clue how to teach music.

{Disclosure, I received a free copy of Zeezok Music Appreciation, and I was compensated for my time, but all the opinions are my own}

What’s in Zeezok Music Appreciation

When I first got the box, I made the kids gather around and look at all the cool stuff in it, because this was a heavy box, look at what all you get:

Did you see that mother lode of stuff?  A full chapter book for each composer, 5 CDs of music, a teacher/student manual, AND a lapbook CD-ROM to work through.  Well, I happily sat down to work through everything, and after looking it over I of course decided to start with Beethoven.  Why skip to the middle of the book?  Because Shroeder from Peanuts loves Beethoven, so why not?  Besides I wanted to immediately skip to Handel for Christmas next….. but best-laid plans and such, it didn’t happen, and why is that?

The Zeezok music appreciation lesson plans

There was too much to do and we didn’t get done before Christmas.  Here are the first few weeks of lessons:

Do you see all that?  They’ve got like 8-10 things to complete in a week.  While some may only take 5 minutes, many of these activities take a long time.  We couldn’t get it all done in time, so we took almost 3 months to complete Beethoven.  3 months!  And we didn’t even do it all, because some of it was for older kids.

Side point: to my mind, that’s a sign of a well-designed elementary curriculum, some stuff was easy for my kids and some was too hard.  If they could do everything then the 5th graders were going to be bored.

Our weeks started off reading the chapter over several days, it took that long because we listened to ALL the music that’s integrated. Listen to this great excerpt from the book:

They don’t do justice to the illustrations of the book, since they only show the cover in the video.  I loved the illustrations, they reminded me of some of my favorite horse books as a kid.

My kids’ favorite part was always when we reached the music, they kept peeking at the book asking if there was more music yet.

That’s how we listened, dancing as hard as we could.  The kids loved it.  Can you tell from the blurry pictures and big grins?

To help make the lessons easier I ripped the CDs to my phone so I could just start them when they were referred to during the chapters.  For just listening we used the CDs.

Quick Break to show you some music-adjacent materials

I figure I’ll share some artist studies to go with this musician study.

• Frida Kahlo artist study
• Chagall artist study
• Queen Elizabeth portrait study
• Van Gogh artist study
• Gustav Klimt artist study

Hands-on music appreciation

One of the things I appreciated most about Zeezok music appreciation was the hands-on components, you know me and my hands-on stuff.

We made porridge, which had rather mixed results in the taste department, but the kids really enjoyed making it and talking all about how Beethoven loved eating it, and our results might have been baked by Beethoven who was known for not paying attention to his food.

I loved putting the lapbooks together because we had more opportunities to talk about what we’d already read about and how Beethoven might have felt about different things.  My boys’ favorite part was the Rhine River component because of the boats. (I might have forgotten to take my printer off grayscale, so the gorgeous color notebooks are in black and white for my kids, who didn’t mind one bit coloring it all in)

When we reached the “how music was created portions of the lessons I made youtube playlists for the kids to watch/listen to the songs, and the kids wanted to listen to some over and over again.  I’m sure I’ll be doing this for all the composers, so be sure to follow my youtube channel. Future Ticia 2023 here, the videos I shared are no longer on YouTube, I have dozens of other playlists, but it looks like I’ll be deleting this one.

This part is one of the activities I referred to that was hard for my kids.  They’re intended for 4-6 grade, and they didn’t completely understand the activity, which is as it should be.

That didn’t stop them from asking me to play the video about 10 times as they laughed at some of them.

My final call on Zeezok music?

I love it, for 2 years, rather than the 1 year they suggest.  It’s just too much for me to complete in 1 year, and that’s a good sign.  It’s a sign of good breadth and depth of material if you can’t complete it all in the time suggested.

I wouldn’t mind if the student workbook/teacher manual was offered in a PDF format, but having it in print made it handy for me to check off what we’d done, so it’s not a make or break for me.

Added in, I just found they’ve got a whole slew of composer books as ebooks.  I might head back and pick up the Tchaikovsky and the Nutcracker Ballet ebook.

Where to get Zeezok music appreciation

Zeezok Music appreciation is available from Zeezok Publishing.  You can get the whole thing for $169.99 or if you only want the lapbook or the composer books those are available by themselves (SCORE!). I’d recommend getting the whole thing, it’s a great deal.