Thad Beach
Thad Beach is a musician, songwriter and teaching artist. He presents over 400 curriculum-related program sessions each year to individual classrooms for preschool, elementary, middle and high school. He has also conducted over 450 week-long songwriting residencies throughout his career as a full time performer and Arts in Education professional.
Songwriting Residency
Thad’s signature songwriting residency involves a core group in the creative process of writing a song about a topic of local interest. With an interdisciplinary approach, Thad guides the students through topic research, lyric development, and other creative processes with a highly participatory and collaborative approach, leading to a song and some type of documentation, rehearsal or performance of the final project.
Postcards from the Dust Bowl Residency for 7th grade social studies/history
Students learn about the Dust Bowl and Great Depression through multimedia images, primary source interviews and Thad’s original songs, in order to discuss technology, agricultural practices and environmental causes and effects. They will use creative writing, visual art and musical experiences to create personas and express their characters’ emotions and situations, describing Dust Bowl events by writing postcard notes, sketching and sharing with classmates.
Workshop Residencies for preschool and elementary
Thad’s participatory musical experiences present literacy, science, history and geography topics to individual classrooms PreK-6th. Literacy programs: Red Reading Wagon and Radical Rhyme Time. Science programs: Pumpkin and Frog Life Cycles, Down in the Swamp, Monarchs and Milkweed: The Amazing Monarch Migration. History and Geography programs: Dust Bowl for elementary, Longitude and Latitude with a Geo-Musical Attitude. Music program: Thad’s Band in a Bucket.
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