The document provides information and suggestions for celebrating Jazz Appreciation Month in April, including 112 different ways to celebrate through educational and performance activities. It encourages focusing on the birthdays of jazz legends like Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald. It also provides reading suggestions for children about jazz and recommends taking kids to live jazz performances. The document offers tips for both parents and teachers, such as introducing kids to jazz music and finding jazz-related activities at local museums or historical sites.

1. Emily Maniak Smithsonian Jazz Institute http://www.smithsonianjazz.org/

2. What I Liked Lesson Plan Page with options for: “ What is Jazz?” “ Grooven' to Jazz(ages 8-13)” Ella Fitzgerald Louis Armstrong http://www.smithsonianjazz.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=90&Itemid=80

3. Jazz Appreciation Month Information on events going on for 2011, why there is a Jazz appreciation month,featured poster offered for free to classrooms, article on women in Jazz.

4. 112 Ways to Celebrate Jazz Band leaders: focus on the jazz legends whose birthdays fall in April: Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Johnny Dodds, Lionel Hampton, Charles Mingus, Gerry Mulligan, Shorty Rogers, Mongo Santamaria, Tito Puente, Freddie Hubbard, Randy Weston, or Herbie Hancock. Get your high school ensemble to compete in Jazz at Lincoln Center's Essentially Ellington High School Band Contest ( www.jazzatlincolncenter.org ). Join the International Association of Jazz Educators (www.iaje.org). Join the MENC: The National Music Educators Association (www.menc.org) and utilize its jazz resources. One of them is the 76-page Teaching Jazz: A Course of Study, created jointly with the International Association of Jazz Educators.

5. Reading Suggestions If you are the parent of a child aged 4-8, read (or get your child to read) The Jazz Flyby Matthew Gollub and Karen Hanke, The Sound That Jazz Makes by Carole Boston Weatherford and Eric Velasquez, Once Upon a Time in Chicago: The Story of Benny Goodman by Jonah Winter and Jeanette Winter, If I Only Had a Horn: Young Louis Armstrong by Roxane Orgill and Leonard Jenkins, or Chris Raschka Mysterious Thelonious or Charlie Parker Played Be Bop. Donate a good overview of jazz to your local library or high school. Several possibilities: such as Tad Gioia's The History of Jazz, or John Edward Hasse's Jazz: The First Century, and Bill Kirchner's The Oxford Companion to Jazz.

6. Parents Take your son or daughter to hear "live" jazz. One under-looked possibility: the jazz band of your local high school or college. Get your child together with a couple friends. Try out different tracks from jazz CDs on them, and ask them to react. Keep trying out pieces til you find some that they like. Find a CD by that artist and give it to your child. Suggest your child log onto to www.SmithsonianJazz.org, to www.ArtsEdge.kennedy-center.org, or another child-friendly jazz site. If you live within driving range of a jazz exhibition (such as the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, in Washington, D.C.), jazz museum (such as the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City), jazz home (such as Scott Joplin's house in Saint Louis) or jazz park (the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park), take your children there.

7. Teachers Go to "This Date in Jazz History" (at www.SmithsonianJazz.org) and find an anniversary that you could use with your students. Read your class a jazz poem (such as those found in The Jazz Poetry Anthology, edited by Sascha Feinstein and Yusef Komunyakaa or their The Second Set: The Jazz Poetry Anthology, Volume 2). if you teach 11th grade history or music, log onto www.jazzinamerica.org, for lesson plans on jazz. Go to the Education Section of www.SmithsonianJazz.org to find classroom lesson plans to introduce your students to jazz, through the lives and music of Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Carter, and Louis Armstrong.