Community reviews for Smithsonian Folkways

Love the articles and the music sample from older and current artists. Love the insight into music history and students can learn the impact that music had on the world during recent history. Very insightful on the evolution of music, however, there is very little engagement for students that actually want to make samples of music themselves and learn about the beats, instruments, etc.

The Smithsonian Folkways site is well organized with rich resources. Students and teachers can search for resources by country, genre, or keywords. There are powerful recordings offered that can allow rich discussions on history and culture. You can use these as starting points for discussions and comparisons to our world today. There are an abundance of lesson plans and resources for teachers. You can choose the lesson plans from an interactive map. They are all downloadable in PDF format. Many of the lessons involve lessons for music classes and students but there are also lessons that involve history and cultural awareness. Use the site as a supplement when learning about various times in history or various cultures. Know that some parts of the site are not free. For example, if you want to hear a native american medicine song you can hear an excerpt but would need to pay around 99 cents to download the full version. However, there are many free resources available. Take some time to browse. The oral histories section is vast. For example, you can hear commentary from Eugene Allen, a butler at the white house talking about First Lady Nancy Reagan. The site contains such a vast array of primary resources that you will need to allow a good bit of time to explore it all However, the search tools should help you find what you need. Also, from the site, it reads that you can "Find Smithsonian Folkways Tools for Teaching at iTunes U. Download free lesson plans, videos, activities, and other great educational resources - or subscribe to get automatic updates." This is site is rich with resources so take advantage and give your students the gift of introducing them to it.

I love the website. The Smithsonian Institution does so well with their websites in general. Music history is a subject that isn't touched much in the elementary classroom but I try my best to make my students aware of music's past. This website gives me the opportunity to focus on specific parts of history, the various music of that part of history, and gives me lesson plan ideas as well. My students are learning more about music history than they ever thought existed! The main downside is that the website is a LOT of reading, but there are ways to make reading fun in a classroom, so I can work around that easily!