Rhythm Telephone

High school orchestra is a great place to play music, like The Star Spangled Banner. Upper graders create new rhythms to the old song and perform them with the class. They rehearse their updated versions of the song using their...

Pick one of these interactive activities to strengthen your knowledge of rhythm and musical notes. Play matching, concentration, flashcards, or a word search to review these musical terms.

Students identify and demonstrate movement elements in relation to musical notation. They clap to rhythms, beat on drums, match musical notes to speech patterns and use the rhythms of the their names to create a dance.

Students compare and contrast the rhythms of marches and jazz. They watch an excerpt about Buddy Bolden from the PBS Ken Burns Jazz documentary, compare/contrast march and jazz rhythms, complete a worksheet, and notate and perform jazz...

Sixth graders work independently and with a partner to demonstrate proficiency of steady beat, meter and basic note values while creating written rhythmic patterns for class performance. State and National Standards are addressed.

This site is an overview of how to read music. The basics of notation such as note and rest values, the names of lines and spaces of both treble and bass clefs, etc. are covered. Includes downloadable audio files.

Fourth graders collaborate in small groups to create simple rhythmic patterns in different time signatures. Each group creates rhythms in a competitive "game" atmosphere and then constructs entire rhythmic groups for presentation to...

Students watch a segment of the PBS Ken Burns JAZZ documentary about Buddy Bolden creating the "Big Four." They compare and contrast the rhythms of marches and jazz based on the examples in the film, and explore notation, subdivision of...

Students focus on reading musical notations. They see, hear, practice and write notations in the lessons to become more independent readers of music. They complete a Rubric for Pitch Worksheet.

Fun awaits both you and your class as you embark on a musical activity. After discussing different rhythmic meters they choose a poem to set to music. The poem must rhyme and be set to a melody in the key of C Major. Because the activity...