The story behind Mr. Young's Music Room — and why everything here is built differently.
That matters more than it sounds. I'm not a former teacher turned content creator. I'm not selling you a system I built years ago and moved on from. I teach K–5 general music at a Title I school in Plant City, Florida, five days a week — about 400 students every week.
Everything in my TPT store was built in that classroom. Tested on those kids. Revised when it flopped and kept when it worked. If it didn't survive a Monday morning with real students, it doesn't end up here.
"Every kid has music in them. Your job is finding the right door."
— The thing I believe most after 15 yearsI started teaching in 2010 in rural Down East Maine — itinerant K–8 across multiple schools, long drives between buildings, figuring out how to teach music with almost no resources. That experience taught me something that still shapes everything I create: constraints make better teachers.
I moved to Florida and eventually landed at a Title I school in Hillsborough County, where I've been ever since. The challenges are different but the core truth is the same — kids respond to music when it's taught the right way, regardless of zip code or budget.
My classroom is built on a few core methodologies that I believe in deeply:
Moveable-Do, four-phase sequencing. Sing first, read later. The ear leads.
Community, ensemble, percussion. Music as a shared human experience.
When kids think they're playing a game, they're actually learning. That's the magic.
Every lesson starts with the question: will they care? If not, redesign it.
I'm not affiliated with or endorsed by John Feierabend or the Feierabend Association for Music Education (FAME). I simply use these principles because they work — and my students prove it every week.
Honestly? Because I couldn't find what I needed. The resources I wanted didn't exist — Feierabend-aligned folk song libraries, gamified listening units, world music lessons built for real general music classrooms. So I built them myself.
Now I share them here — not because I've figured everything out, but because 15 years of trial and error in a real classroom is worth something. And because music teachers, especially in under-resourced schools, deserve better tools.
Grab a free resource and see what a classroom-tested lesson actually looks like.
Free Download Browse Shop