1. I put 4 chairs in the front of the room and explained that each chair equaled one beat.
2. I had one person sit in each chair. The class was able to figure out that they were quarter notes.
3. I had 2 students sit on each chair and the class discovered they were ti-tis (or pairs of eighth notes).
4. I had 4 students on each chair (this is where things got a bit cozy!) and they discovered they were tika-tikas (4 sixteenth notes). I stopped here to re-explain that they were 4 sounds on 1 beat. NOT 4 beats long.
5. I had 3 students sit on each chair. The first time I had one student sit on the lap of the person on the left and then one person next to them. This was a tika-ti (2 people had to share half a chair/beat). Then we figured out how to make a ti-tika.
6. I had 1 student lay across two chairs. The class discovered this person was a half note. I did the same with 3 chairs for dotted half and 4 chairs for whole note. By this point the kids were starting to really understand. YAY!!
7. The last step was to make 3 people fit on 2 chairs to create our short-long-short. After telling the 2 outside people they only got half of a chair and the middle person got 2 halves (or a whole), kids started putting together the pieces and trying to guess what rhythms made up a short-long-short pattern. Some of the kids were really close to discovering it was eighth-quarter-eighth, but I didn't reveal that answer just yet.
8. The last thing I did was split the kids into 2 groups. Their group had to form a rhythm using all of their group members and the other group had to notate it. Now they had to use some math to decide how to divide themselves up among the four chairs!
Like I said, it got a bit noisy and a bit uncomfortable at times, but I think the lesson really worked well. Kids were problem solving, drawing conclusions, and notating rhythms. And they had fun!! Woohoo!
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| A Whole Note! |
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| Tika-tika, tika-tika, ta, ti-ti |
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| Ti-ti, tika-tika, ta, tika-tika |
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