Meet Florence Price

Grade level

Grades 3–5

Time

About 20 minutes

Topic

Composers

Answer key

Yes, page 2 of the PDF

Kids practice

Reading for information, Recalling facts from a passage, Placing composers in time, Connecting a composer to their music

What kids do

Printed on the sheet:

1. Florence Price was born in 1887 in Little Rock, Arkansas. Her mother was a music teacher and gave Florence her first piano lessons. Florence played in her first recital when she was four years old. After high school she studied piano and organ at the New
2. England Conservatory of Music in Boston. Later she moved to Chicago. In 1933 the
3. Chicago Symphony Orchestra played her Symphony No. 1 in E minor. It was the first time a major American orchestra performed a symphony written by a Black woman.
4. Florence Price wrote more than 300 pieces, including symphonies, songs and piano music. She died in 1953.
5. Florence Price was born in Arkansas.
6. Her father gave her her first piano lessons.
7. She studied music in Boston.
8. She wrote only three pieces of music.

Teacher tip

Find Little Rock, Boston and Chicago on a map to follow her path. Then listen to a minute of her Symphony No. 1 in E minor.

How to use it

• Have kids underline the sentence that proves each true or false answer.
• Find the composer’s home on a map and their years on a class timeline.
• Read the reminder box at the top of the sheet together, then do the first item as a class.

Watch for

Thinking every composer lived at the same time. The five here span more than 250 years.

Talk about it

• What was hard in this composer’s life?
• Where have you seen or heard this in a song we know?

Take it further

Write three questions you would ask the composer.

US Letter, prints well in black and white. Free for home and classroom use: print as many copies as you need.