band Who Could Ask for Anything More?
How Kids Do (and Don’t) Get Rhythm Julie Brown, WMEA State Chair, Band
One of the main ar- eas that I see the students I teach struggling with year after year is rhyth- mic literacy. I know note values and sim- ple rhythmic pas- sages are taught in elementary general
music classes, but even after reviewing it with students, this element still eludes many students to some degree. Students struggle with counting rhythms accurately, playing rhythms accurately, and just ba- sically understanding the relationships between whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, etc. Recognizing this deficiency in the students I teach, I made increased rhythmic literacy a focus in the classroom. Through focusing on rhythms, I realized that students’ inabilities to understand rhythm actually stemmed from several different sources.
Visual Learners Examples:
1. Students don’t get the fractional relationship amongst the note durations.
2. Students don’t understand meter.
3. Students lack an internal pulse when performing.
4. Students struggle with transitioning from one vocabulary to another.
On top of these roadblocks, one has to consider how diverse a population one has in the band classroom, the different ways students learn, and how long it takes to incubate a new concept before it “sticks.” It is because of this that I have challenged myself to come up with as many different ways of explaining rhythm as I possibly can. The way I see it, the more different strategies I have to explain rhythm, the more students I can reach. Let’s address each of the above-mentioned roadblocks separately.
In my experience, students may under- stand what a quarter note looks like, that it gets one beat, and that it’s called a “quarter note,” but few understand the relationship between a quarter note and other note durations. Most music teachers probably have something similar to the diagram above somewhere in their classroom or incorporate it into their teaching somehow, but students still struggle with the concept. I have found that widespread success only
Continued on page 20 Kinesthetic Learners Examples:
Math?! I Thought This Was Band!
18
April 2017
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