Mike Simpson: Teach and Play Steel Pans

Inspire your students to make some noise with Teach and Play Steel Pans!

The five pieces in this book represent an exciting and varied selection of steel-pan music, from traditional calypso and soca, to a reggae piece and a Beyoncé song. Each piece is broken down into clear and simple steps that show you how to build up the music gradually with your class. Combined with the accompanying DVD - which contains over 50 short clips of the author and a group of KS3 students demonstrating all of the instruments and patterns to each piece - teaching and learning world music has never been so easy or enjoyable.

The fivepieces are supplemented with valuable background information about the music and culture, cross-curricular projects, composing ideas, advice on assessment and guidance on teaching whole-class world-music ensembles. The material in this book has been designed primarily for use with KS2 and KS3 classes, but the addition of higher-ability parts for each piece means the book can be tailored easily to KS4 as well. It is not necessary to own authentic instruments to get the most out of this book as all of the pieces work equally well on classroom alternatives.

'This series has been written by a genuine expert who has thorough knowledge of his subject and shares this with the reader in a lively, enthusiastic and passionate way. I have never found any books before that are so clear in explaining the fundamentals of these world-music genres, and doing so in a format based around practical, relevant and achievable tasks is even more remarkable. I can see these books becoming one of those series that every music teacher will have either read or heard about in years to come. '

Matt Allen, Head of Music, Chessington Community College, Kingston