Teaching the Elements of Music

Rhythm and Tempo Activities

• Steady Beat - Find the beat, march the beat, tap the beat, etc.  
• Conduct the beat using traditional conducting patterns.
• Clap the rhythm of syllables in names, words, phrases, etc.  
• Long vs. short and fast vs. slow
• Locate the accents in words.
• Rhythm Echos with Words, Jump Rope Rhymes, phrases, etc.
• Raps and Rhymes 
• Keep a steady beat with lap, clap, tap or drums, tambourine, etc.
• Find a recording or MIDI file of a drum beat and rap over a drumbeat.
• Rhythm Echos - See the rhythm chapter and powerpoint presentations.
• Aural (listening) echos - Play a regular rhythmic pattern and have the child echo.  See the rhythm echoes powerpoint presentations.  Generally you will want to be consistent with your patterns.  Use a 4/4 Common time signature.  Make each pattern 4 beats long and stick with a walking tempo.  Use rhythms with quarter notes and eighth notes in the beginning.  You can begin to introduce syncopation as the children become more tuned in.  Put the rhythm in your hands, your feet, or play a rhythm instrument.
• Introduce rhythm notation See the rhythm chapter and powerpoint presentations.
• Whole Note - Eagle - Glide 2 3 4
• Half Note - Penguin - Slide 2 Slide 2
• Quarter Note - Bear - Walk walk walk walk
• Eighth Note - Squirrel - Run run run run Run run run run
• Clap rhythms of well-known songs or nursery rhymes and try to recognize the rhythm.
• Use the Indian Gathering Drum to play rhythm echoes.  Make it a relay game and line the students up.  As you play a 4-beat rhythm, each child echoes and hands off the beater to the next child.
• Draw a musical timeline and create symbols for long, short tones.
• Count how many beats as you play or sing tones - or watch the second hand on the clock.
• Introduce rests - timed silence.
• Introduce time signatures and count beats in measures.
• Explore duple and triple meters. 4/4 vs. 3/4
• Use a metronome to explore the beats per minute with various tempos.
• Use musical terminology for tempos - accelerando, rallentando, etc.
• For older students 
• Fractions and rhythmic proportions
• Rhythm Math

  Melody Activities 

• Sing! Begin with simple repetitive songs with choruses.
• Melody echos - What is your name?  etc.
• Use Solfege - do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do  (See 
• Sing solfege echos. 
• Help children discriminate between lows and highs, melodies that go up, down or stay the same.
• Use body signals from solfege - or create your own using hands to show the rise and fall of the melody.
• Help children hear intervals - the distance between the pitches of the melody may be steps from one note to an adjacent note, or skips where pitches leap from one to another skipping a tone or tones.
• Use the colored bells to introduce the scale of 8 tones from low to high.
• Sing Do Re Mi from the Sound of Music and ring the bells as you sing the scale.
• Teach children how to ring the bells appropriately.  
• Discuss the similarities between high do and low do.
• Sing words or phrases and point out the natural melody in comparison to the spoken word or phrase.  
• Sing a story!  Make up opera recitatives and arias!
• Read songs from the colored bell powerpoint collection.
• Bells - Have children learn to echo your playing or singing using the step bells on tone bars from the glockenspiel or xylophone.
• Demonstrate low and high pitches in relationship to the size of the bars on the bells.
• Teach breathing and phrasing as you sing with children.  Take deep breaths and let the air out slowly - singing through the phrase.  Use vowel sounds to help children use their "vocal cavity."
• Teach enunciation of words and the difference between vowels and consonants.
• Play the piano and demonstrate the treble clef and bass clef sections of the keyboard.
• Create pentatonic (5-tone) melodies using just the black keys on the piano.
• Try the question and answer phrasing with just the black tone bars of your glockenspiel, tone bars, etc.  Count 2 measures for and improvise a "musical question" with the black keys or bars.  Have the child improvise an "answer" on the other tone bars.  Typically one person can use the 5 lowest black bars and the other can use the higher 5 black tone bars.
• Use an electronic keyboard.  Preferably use a MIDI keyboard that you can connect to the computer.
• Teach children to listen and imitate melodies on the keyboard.

Harmony and Form

Harmony is formed either by sounds that are played or song at the same time (homophonic) or by sounds that are created with simultaneous melodies (like a round or canon).  Form is the design of music, incorporating repetition, contrast, unity, and variety.  The organization of music, its shape or structure.

• Play chords on a guitar, piano, or autoharp as you sing songs.
• Electronic keyboards frequently have chord progressions and musical styles.
• Demonstrate chords using the colored bells.  Discuss which tones sound good together (consonant) and which tones seem to clash (dissonant).
• Demonstrate the I chord, V chord, and IV chord.  Example - La Bamba
• Sing Rounds or Canons.
• Create an "Ostinato" - or repeated patterns that continue beneath a melody. (Example: Ding Ding Dong repeated through out "Are You Sleeping?"
• Listen to polyphonic music, rounds, canons, fugues as the melodies combine at different times.  Good examples might be Handel's Messiah.
• Look for repeated patterns.  Try the colored bell songs in the powerpoint presentation.  The colors clearly show that some phrases are identical and others are different.  Look for repetitions in notation - rhythm, melody, chord patterns, etc.
• Explore song forms - verse/chorus, ABA, AABA, ABC, etc.  Repeated patterns unify the song form.  
• Make up repeated choruses and patterns in raps and songs.

The Expressive Elements of Music  - Add Variety and Contrast to Music

Timbre - The distinctive quality of tone of a sound.

• Listen to sounds around you.
• Using rhythm instruments - divide into 3 groups and instruct different groups to echo.
• Wood - woodblock, guiro, sticks, etc.
• Metal - triangle, cowbell, tambourine, cymbals, etc.
• Skins - drums (some tambourines have both skin and metal)
• Create sound effects for stories.  
• Listen for high, middle, low, loud, soft, long, short.
• Use additional adjectives for descriptions - shrill, thump, rumble, crash, clunk, etc.
• Create your own instruments.
• Listen to musical instruments and identify instrument families.
• Strings
• Brass
• Woodwinds
• Percussion
• Listen to different timbres in voices.  (Hide students and have them try to recognize voices of classmates, teachers, etc.)
• Learn the voice ranges by sung example or by families of instruments (recorders, saxophones, etc)
• Soprano
• Alto
• Tenor
• Bass
• Look inside a piano
• See how the hammers hit the strings
• Examine the long/low and shorter/high strings
• Watch the vibration of the strings
• Demonstrate the concept of vibration
• Examine guitar strings, frets, and harmonic proportions as you divide the string into half, fourths, etc.
• Use bells to discuss vibration by letting them ring and then stopping the vibration with the mallet (or resting the mallet on the tone bar in order to not allow vibration.
• Create a homemade string instrument with rubber bands
• Play combs with wax paper to feel vibration 

Tempo - The pace at which music moves, based on the speed of the underlying beat.

• Use a metronome to determine fast and slow tempos.
• Count the number of beats per minute
• Discuss the musical terminology for various tempos from slow to fast to very fast.
• Move, dance, walk, run, etc. according to tempo directions..
• Use musical terminology to give directions to children.
• Conduct tempo changes from  faster - accelerando to slower - rallentando or ritardando.
• Conduct rhythm patterns and insert changes in tempo, rubato (expressive), or fermata (hold)
• Teach children to conduct the class.
• Use children's songs of varied tempos.
• Locate music for classroom transitions according to tempo, volume, energy, etc.
• Use slower tempos for classroom relaxation activities.

Dynamics - The volume of sound; the loudness or softness of a musical passage.

• Teach volume dynamics and 
• Show children markings - f for forte and p for piano.
• Discuss the early name of the piano and one of the first keyboards to play both loud and soft - the pianoforte.
• Sing, speak, play softly - piano or pianissimo.
• Conduct volume changes by raising arms for crescendo and lowering arms for decrescendo.
• Create drum rolls
• Show dynamic markings for crescendo and descrescendo.
• Develop sensitivity to loud and soft music in movie scores.
• Discuss the appropriate dynamics for events in a story.

Literacy Elements  

See the Introductory discussion of the English Language Arts standards and Mathematics standards for suggestions on how to use music to reinforce learning.

• Find the rhymes in songs
• Sing and rap nursery rhymes, jump rope rhymes
• Listen to and play syllables
• Create word rhythms and accents
• Use vowel sounds in singing
• Enunciate Consonants
• Examine dipthongs in singing
• Vocabulary and Concept Development
• Repetition and Memorization
• Patterns in pitch or tone
• Reading lyrics
• Sing songs that tell stories
• Use stories with music
• Listen and sing songs about characters and events. (Folk Songs, Opera, Musicals, Cartoons)
• Listen to background "mood" music in a movie of story.
• Sing songs for celebrations - Holidays, Patriotic, Multicultural
• Learn concepts of print in music notation
• Learn concepts of tone color and timbre
• Practice musical conversations - Questions and Answers
• Play recorders or song flutes
• Sing and play games
• Move and dance to activity songs

 Numeracy Elements

• Echo rhythms and patterns
• Create a musical timeline - Understand the concept of time and units of measurement, beginning, middle, end, etc.
• Play, clap, march to steady beat
• Examine metronome - count ticking of the beat
• Count number of beats in a minute - Watch the clock
• Count and play word syllables, patterns, phrases
• Count measures in 4/4 or 3/4 or 6/8 time.
• Locate natural strong beats in measures - 1-2-3-4 (odds or evens)
• Examine the equal division of beats by measures.  Most children's music is counted by duples - twos or fours.  (1-2-1-2 or 1-2-3-4).  However, some music is triple, counted by threes or sixes.  (1-2-3 or 1-2-3-4-5-6).  Children can learn to aurally discriminate between duple and triple meter as they learn to group notes in patterns of twos and threes.
• Classify notes by long, short, equal - Length of time
• Understand the importance of rests indicating silence equal to notes of the same value.
• Understand fast and slow tempos.
• Identify, sort, and classify note values in rhythmic notation.  
• Examine the mathematical relationships between whole, half, quarter, eighth, sixteenth notes.
• Examine musical scale construction - whole and half step combinations for major and minor scales.  Count the 8 tones of a major scale.
• Analyze the difference between music and noise.
• Recognize the sounds of instruments and voices by timbre.
• Look at sound waves of different materials in a computer sound recording program.
• Create chords and triads
• Examine notes and learn the different multiplication principles of the rhythmic notation -  stems, flags, etc. as they signify doubling of note values.  
• Look at the ratios of note values in the rhythm section.  
• Rhythmic notation is a tangible method of demonstrating fractions in sound.  
• Examine the physics of sound and the overtone series with a fundamental tone and a natural mathematical ratio of vibrations.  
• Examine tone quality and timbre in terms of frequencies.
• Use a MIDI sound synthesizer to create drum beats and musical patterns.
• Digitize sound on the computer.