To study music elements, such as beat, rhythm, pitch, melody, harmony, etc., is a prominent part of music education. The purpose of this study was to clarify how elementary students in Australia learn dynamics, which is one of music elements, using a series of music textbooks Music Room.
Descriptions about learning dynamics were extracted from the textbooks and analyzed by categorized into 7 learning approaches. The findings were as follows: (a) The contents of leaning dynamics were placed mainly in the lower grades, with listening, performing, creating, and composing. (b) The contents of leaning dynamics developed in stages in the first half of a series of the textbooks, while repeated the same sort of leaning in the latter half. ( c) In the lower grades, dynamics was learned separately from other musical elements. As grade advanced, dynamics was treated with other musical elements synthetically. The learning of the upper grades was take place on the basis of what learned before, not focusing only dynamics. (d) The final target was established to apply dynamics autonomously to practical music performance. Dynamic marks used in t~e textbooks were restricted to f, p, crescendo, decrescendo, and accent. A variety of musical activities with the restriction of dynamic marks made possible for students to acquire the ability to play music with dynamics
