Beyond the Grade currently offers 6 music programs: Beats, Rockadoodle, Guitar class, Drum kit class, Keyboard class and Live Performance class.
Our curriculum is guided and designed around the student’s interests to keep them engaged in the classroom. The delivery is intended to create a lifelong relationship with music, and bring them greater cultural awareness.
We believe that our music programs are complimentary to the skills that are acquired during in-school time music programming. Allowing students to apply their knowledge to music that interest them.
Learning music as a language – we believe that the ability to play music is already inside every student, and we are teaching them functional musicianship skills to bring that music to life. Functional musicianship skills are skills which open up imaginative
possibilities, or toolboxes, to the musicians, such as:
✴ chord-reading and interpretation (good fingering and chord inversions to facilitate this);
✴ The ability to feel harmonic rhythm and beat first in the body;
✴ Understanding that “rhythm is just the way the words go”;
✴ Ability to sing along as they play, facilitating skills they will use from now on;
✴ Imaginative use of musical patterning abilities: composing, lyrics, arranging, etc.
Our classes are taught by working musicians, which allow the students to learn important musical lessons used in the real world, as well as gain knowledge of music as a career from a professional.
List of Current Partner Programs:
Cook Elementary, McBee Elementary, Elgin Elementary, BTW Elementary, Neidig Elementary, Blazier Elementary, Smith Elementary, Baty Elementary, Hillcrest Elementary, Del Valle Middle School, Mendez Middle School, Paredes Middle School, Reagan High School, Travis Heights Elementary, Berkman Elementary and Wells Branch Elemetary. We also work with 1 charter school, IDEA Allan, and 2 private schools; Leaf Spring School, and The Jewish Community Center.
We are proud to be partnering with Lifework’s shelter program and Austin Park’s and Rec Lending Library programs.