The Music Department
The quality and breadth of music-making at Praht Thai School is designed to be another strong point of focus in the school. Music has been described as a powerful, unique form of communication that can transform the way students feel, think and act.
Every child learns an instrument.
The Music Department offers tuition in traditional Thai Instruments in addition to Piano, Guitar and recorder all given by specialist teachers of this age-group.

Class teaching in music takes a fun and creative slant while maintaining a balanced training in aural appreciation, music recognition, rhythm understanding and construction and music theory throughout the curriculum. The terms performing and composing have a broad meaning when they describe what your child will be taught in class. Performing refers to any activity that gives rise to musical sound, either sung or played. Composing encompasses any act of musical creation from simple experiments with sound to improvising and, inventing music in groups. Notation, traditional or otherwise, can and should be introduced at any of these stages.

General Music
We teach music according to the following category structures:

• Reading/writing
• Singing
• Movement
• Performance
• Composing/improvising
• Listening

The objectives of teaching music in our school are to enable children to:

• know and understand how sounds are made and then organised into musical structures;
• know how music is made through a variety of instruments;
• know how music is composed and written down;
• know how music is influenced by the time, place and purpose for which it was written;
• develop the interrelated skills of performing, composing and appreciating music.

Within each lesson there is a focus on one concept, e.g., tempo. 
Rather than presenting a host of unrelated activities, our ‘threaded approach’ continually reinforces one concept, providing a variety of ways for students to learn within the confines of a class session.  The focus on the concept and only that concept for that lesson will demonstrate how it pervades all aspects of music as well as facilitates the verbal, visual, and physical reinforcement of the that concept.

Our music curriculum applies two forms of thinking and development activities to enhance the overall learning experience. These principles guide our delivery methods.

LOTS Learning:  This is lower-level thinking, basically referring to recall and acquired knowledge of ideas and information.  Asking the class to identify the kind of song, its place of origin, and reading the words are examples of LOTS learning.

HOTS Learning:  Higher-order thinking skills includes application, synthesis, evaluation, and those kinds of thinking skills that require some sort of repositioning of the knowledge.  Reading the rhythms of the song as the introduction (this is a new arrangement of rhythmic patterns previously learned in other songs) requires an application of knowledge.  Improvising the B section of the song requires applying the concepts of meter, rhythmic duration, and semblance of the beginning and end of the piece (form) drawing upon synthesizing skills.  Listening to the new example of literature also allows them to apply their working knowledge of AB form to a new situation.

Music is a unique way of communicating that can inspire and motivate children. It is a vehicle for personal expression, and it can play an important part in the personal and cognitive development of people. Music reflects the culture and society we live in, and so the teaching and learning of music enables children to better understand the world they live in. Besides being a creative and enjoyable activity, music can also be a highly academic and demanding subject. It also plays an important part in helping children feel part of a community. We provide opportunities for all children to create, play, perform, move to and enjoy music, to develop the skills and to appreciate a wide variety of musical forms.

The Praht Thai philosophy in our Music Programme is deliver  learning in general music that is both well planned and delivered with the ultimate goal of producing students who are becoming life-long learners and consumers of music.