Curriculum Resources for Teachers

Local Centers, Global Sounds Teaching Units

Welcome teachers! These curriculum units offer an opportunity for both music and regular classroom teachers to tap into the historic, rare, and culturally diverse collection of Wisconsin music housed with the Local Centers, Global Sounds (LCGS) digital archives. Selected recordings from the archives include traditional and contemporary music of the Ho-Chunk, Oneida, and Ojibwe nations, and from Wisconsin’s European American, African American, and Hmong immigrant communities, past and present. Lessons and extended resources invite teachers and students to participate in the music and related arts, to connect to Wisconsin’s immigration history, and to explore the important role that music has, and continues to play, in the social, occupational, and religious life of Wisconsinites.

Curriculum units developed by Anne Fraioli.

Local Centers, Global Sounds was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which is gratefully acknowledged.  The project team was directed by James P. Leary, Ruth Olson and Jeanette Casey.

Five Units For Schools

These units are available as pdfs from the links below:

Introduction and Wisconsin State Standards

Unit 1 – Wisconsin Lumberjack Songs

Unit 2 – Songs of Courtship

Unit 3 – Songs of the Spirit

Unit 4 – Farm to Table

Unit 5 – Let’s Dance!

The Units are also available as Word documents, with the images and texts in separate files:

Unit 1 – Text / Unit 1 – Images

Unit 2 – Text / Unit 2 – Images

Unit 3 – Text / Unit 3 – Images

Unit 4 – Text / Unit 4 – Images

Unit 5 – Text / Unit 5 – Images

Sound Recordings

All sound recordings used in the Teaching units are available for streaming or download here:

LCGS Teaching Units Recordings