Rhythm Squares: To set up this rhythm game, I got two white pieces of posterboard and divided them into 4 quadrants. Then I drew quarter notes, half notes, eighth notes, quarter rests, and half rests on index cards. I taped the notes to form different rhythms in each of the boxes, making sure that both posters had the same rhythms. I also put a piece of velcro in each quadrant, and then I took two yellow circles I previously made as tokens for another activity and put the other half of the velcro on the back of those. I asked for two students to come up to the board and gave each of them a token. Then I played one of the rhythms on a drum and the students raced to put their token on the correct rhythm. I’d usually ask the class who was on the right rhythm to keep everyone engaged. This one was really a hit across all my classes — even some of the students who initially said, “I’ll try it but I won’t be good at it,” found some enjoyment out of it. There was just enough of a competition to keep the kids having fun, but not fighting or getting upset over winning/losing.
Credit: Rhythm Squares. I would love to try this game as she actually describes it in her post, but I wanted to come up with an indoor activity, and the idea of the kiddos running didn’t really appeal to me, haha. But I might try it one day during the school summer program!
Grocery Rhythms: This activity I did with my younger classes, mostly. I took strips of paper and wrote different foods on them (mostly from my actual grocery list). I ended up with 1 syllable words (quarter note), 2 syllable words (2 eighth notes), 3 syllable words (2 eighths + 1 quarter), and 6 syllable words (4 eighth notes + 2 quarter notes). I put each rhythm on a paper plate, and the students’ job was to sort the foods on the correct plates. Even for my younger classes without much rhythmic knowledge, they were able to be successful in this activity by sorting by the number of syllables. Then I had them “go shopping” and pick 4 foods. Each person got a turn to play the rhythm of those foods on the drum. I almost made up a rap to go along with it, but never got around to it. Some kids added their own words, like saying “I like to eat” before they started and things like that.
Credit: Musical Groceries. You’ll see here that I took my own twist on this idea, but this is also a great way to go about it.
Pass the Ball: This was just a simple intervention I used with my younger classes. I put on some popular music and we worked on feeling a steady beat by passing a ball around. We started with slow songs (like Radioactive) and gradually worked up to faster songs (like Can’t Stop The Feeling).
Credit: I saw my supervisor use this once in a session.
Carnival of the Animals: For this intervention, I printed out cards that had each animal represented in Saint Saens “Carnival of the Animals.” Each student got a ziplock bag with the animal cards in it. They laid the cards out and listened to the music to guess which animal was being played. We also talked about certain qualities of the animals that were represented in each piece (e.g.: the cheetah was fast, elephant sounded like it was stomping, kangaroo sounded like it was jumping, turtle was slow, etc.)
Credit: This was also a suggestion from my supervisor that she used while she was at this facility!
Drum Circle: I started working on drum circle activities with some of my older classes around this time. I used Kalani’s Let’s All Play Our Drum to start the group, and then I used his Orbit – II game. First I did this by just sending one pattern around, and eventually I tried layering patterns at the same time. Layering the patterns was pretty tricky, so sometimes I stopped the group to process what we could do to make it easier. Some ideas they came up with were only paying attention to the person in front of you, making eye contact, and tuning me out (hello problem solving!). I’ll talk about more drum circle interventions that I learned at a training in my next post!
– Arianna (: