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The Great Musicians Biography Series for Children Free Unit Study/Whole Language lesson plans for the elementary-aged student available on this page!
Each features midi files to listen to, internet supplements to enhance your child's learning enjoyment, and a seperate listing of musical terms to increase the student's vocabulary. Written by Opal Wheeler and Sybil Deucher, these out-of-print biographies for the young student of music are a delight. The reader is led into the world of each composer: their early years and adult life are introduced along with engaging explanations of the musical forms of their compositions.
About Opal Wheeler from More Junior Authors, 1963. "During my early years in Superior, Wisconsin, my birthday was not anticipated with the usual eagerness, because Halloween was the time when an especially mischievous brood of four brothers and two sisters could find a particular outlet for wildest pranks. Growing up on the tip end of Lake Superior was rugged, challenging us all in the fiercely cold winters. But we skated, slid downhill on our homemade sleds or broken chunks of Mother's mixing bowl, played hockey or went iceboating on the lake in forty-below-zero weather. And never a day without an exciting adventure, like one I set down in 1957 in The Miracle Dish. Music was my obsession. By ear I played for hours on the old upright rosewood piano ("Stars Over Bethlehem"), and always accompanied the hordes of music-loving neighbors and visitors thronging our hospitable living room. My compositions were endless. To preserve them, my father slipped a nickel into my apron pocket for every laborious note set down. At six, all of the Mother Goose verses had been set to music and Sing Mother Goose is a product of that childhood period. After the usual schooling, higher education continued at the State Normal School, the Universities of Wisconsin and Washington, and, after an interval, Columbia University. Foreign shores beckoned me to France, where I studied the piano, and then singing in Italy. Years were spent in working with children of all ages, using music not only as a study, but as a therapy in ridding them of physical and mental ills. The lure of strange and out-of-the-way places has taken me twice around the globe, and countless times abroad to collect firsthand material at the birthplaces of composers and authors. While lecturing on music during four summers at one of our universities, there arose a need for material on the lives of writers of music to put into the hands of children. And so from necessity I found myself writing biographies of composers based on the material gathered through the years."  Miss Wheeler has written many books about the lives of musicians--Chopin, Schumann, Handel, Tchaikovsky, etc. Many have been translated into more than half-a-dozen languages and are read by children around the world. After ten years of writing books, published by E.P. Dutton, Miss Wheeler married her publisher, the late John Macrae, president of Dutton. She now lives in "a Mother Goose French house in Belvedere, California, high on a hilltop overlooking the bay and Golden Gate Bridge."
More biographical information about Opal Wheeler, a bibliography of titles, and page scans are available at ABC Books.
Unit Studies Sebastian Bach, the Boy from Thuringia
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