Season Six
Episode 132
Sequencing Rhythmic Concepts
What grade should students learn sixteenth notes? How long should we focus on a specific note value? What should be taught first: tika-ti or ti-tika? The answer to all of these questions is “well, it depends.” There’s no ‘must’ in terms of when students should learn specific notes or how long we should spend in making sure students understand the concepts. Some years my students move at a faster pace and other years students demonstrate that they need more time practicing certain rhythms. However, it is helpful to know the order that you will be teaching rhythms so that you know not only what students already know, but where they’re heading so that you can build sequential learning over many lessons.
I’m going to share the sequence that I use with students and the why behind it. Let’s start with the why.
When we look at the musical pieces that we are using with students, we want to think about a few things… okay a lot of things, but simplified we’d want to consider:
What rhythms do students already know?
What pitches with solfege do they already know?
What are the unfamiliar aspects in the piece for our students
When we are using music for the purpose of teaching a rhythmic concept, students should know all of the rhythms in that piece except the new note or rhythm that is being taught. This means that if students know a quarter note and a quarter rest, but don’t know what paired eighth notes are - then the paired eighth notes are the concept that we are teaching. If students know the quarter note and quarter rest in a song, but the song contains paired eighth notes, sixteenth notes, dotted half notes, and a whole rest - all of which students don’t know - then this is not a piece we want to use with them to introduce a new concept because there’s too many aspects that are unknown.
I should add that you might find that you only need to teach one of the phrases of a song for the new concept. There may be many aspects in the song that are unknown, BUT in the phrase or segment that you are using to teach a concept then in that phrase/segment there should be all known aspects except for the new concept.
Our musical selections and what they contain rhythmically will drive the order that we use them with students. And I should add that not every song might be used to teach rhythm concepts. Some songs are better used to teach melodic concepts or other musical terms. So I’m going to focus in this episode solely on rhythmic concepts only. Here is the order that I teach concepts
The first note that students learn is a quarter note. Establish a steady beat. Establish that there can be one sound on one beat.
Then I go to quarter rests - students often think that because there is no sound that it means there is no beat. Students learn that a beat can contain sound or no sound, but the beat is still there.
From here I teach paired eighth notes - two sounds on a beat.
Then sixteenth notes - four sounds on a beat.
There are many ways you can branch out from here. One way isn’t better than the other - just depends what your song material contains and how you want to move forward.
I like to move onto half note - two beats with one sound. Then half rest. Whole note and whole rest.
Then students identify that eighth note pairs can be separated and tails added to them so that they are now individuals. They are like friends who are inseparable, but have now decided that while they like to be together, they want a little social distancing. An analogy that works for our covid times.
After we separated the eighth notes, students learn syncopa (or ta di di). We move forward into combinations of eighth and sixteenth notes
Then come all of the dotted notes - dotted quarter with single eighth, dotted half.
If we are really ambitious and things are rocking and rolling then we get to the eighth rest.
Triplets are often covered when I’m introducing some kind of barred instrument or drum piece with students. I find that this rhythm becomes it’s own thing and happens more naturally. I don’t always teach this as the final point and don’t really have it as its own separate learning objective. So many barred instrument pieces use a triplet rhythm and students tend to really get it
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