Classroom 200
Bring music to life in your classroom! Created by teachers, for teachers
Classroom 200 is a free online resource for school teachers working with students up to the age of 14, worldwide. It is featured in the National Plan for Music Education.
Featuring 200 recordings of inspiring music in a range of styles, plus accompanying lesson plans, Classroom 200 is all about bringing music to life in the classroom. From Berlioz to Bob Marley, Rutter to Rag’n’Bone Man, there’s so music to discover. Classroom 200 celebrates the diverse musical worlds of folk, classical, jazz, world, rock, pop, musicals, film and TV, and more! It’s about what links music together, not what sets it apart.
Quick links
Classroom 200 helps teachers with:
- Exploring a world of inspirational music – there are 200 pieces to get stuck into.
- Encouraging creativity in the classroom, supported by a diverse range musical styles.
- Planning is made easy with ready-made lesson plans, resources and activities
- Linking activities in the classroom directly with the Model Music Curriculum, the Curriculum for Wales and the Curriculum for Excellence and the National Curriculum in Northern Ireland.
Classroom 200 and the curriculum
The lesson plans that accompany each piece cover the themes of performing, listening, musical skills or appraising, which link directly with music curriculums across the UK.
Classroom 200 can be used to meet the National Curriculum’s Key Stage 1 Attainment Target: ‘to listen with concentration and understanding to a range of high-quality live and recorded music’.
At Key Stage 2, it can also be used to ‘appreciate and understand a wide range of high-quality live and recorded music drawn from different traditions and from great composers and musicians’ and ‘develop an understanding of the history of music’.
At Key Stage 3, the lesson plans feature a wide range of activities, allowing teachers to have a variety of the national curriculum covered by using only one resource. In particular, the pieces in the resource can be used to ‘identify and use the inter-related dimensions of music expressively and with increasing sophistication, including use of tonalities, different types of scales and other musical devices.’
Classroom 200 can be used to demonstrate learners’ control, use and understanding of musical elements, provide many opportunities to perform, compose, listen and appraise their work and the work of others.
Classroom 200 can be used to meet some of the First-level outcomes of Curriculum for Excellence, being an appropriate resource particularly for EXA 1-19a: ‘I have listened to a range of music and can respond by discussing my thoughts and feelings’.
Classroom 200 can also be used to meet a range of the Expressive Arts experiences and outcomes from Early to Second level, particularly for EXA 0-18a, EXA 1-18a, EXA 2-18a, ‘Inspired by a range of stimuli, and working on their own and/or with others, students can express and communicate their ideas, thoughts and feelings through a range of musical activities.’
Lesson Plans for older learners also meet a range of the experiences and outcomes in Third and Fourth levels, particularly EXA 3-16a, EXA 4-17a, EXA 4-17b and ECA 3-19a.
In Key Stages 1 and 2, Classroom 200 lesson plans will enable pupils to work creatively with sound, by investigating, experimenting selecting and combining sound to express feelings, ideas, mood and atmosphere, and listen and response to their own and others’ music-making, thinking and talking about sounds, effects and musical features in music that they create, perform or listen to.
At Key Stage 3, lesson plans promote developing thinking skills and personal capabilities, as well as specific areas of musical development, including but not limited to; improvising, composing and performing music in a range of styles, performing individually and in groups and discussing points of interpretation, listening and appraising their own music and that of others.
Classroom 200 is a collaboration between ABRSM, Universal Music Group, and ClassicFM with support from the English Folk Dance and Song Society, NYJO, NYO, Berlioz 150, Trac Cymru and Bristol Beacon.
