Category: General

When grade one students start in my music class, we spend a lot of time engaging with and having fun interacting with music. We sing songs, play games and chant a lot of poems and stories. This action helps the students solidify the feeling of concepts such as beat or rhythm in their bodies and minds before we try and analyze it with proper notation. I use colour cards and we make up rhythms to colours such as blue, blue, purple, green. We have also created chants connected to holidays such as Santa, sleigh, reindeer, reindeer. Below is a lesson that I wrote to help my students create rhythms around Easter time last year. However, this lesson can be substituted with any time of the year, using any group of words that have one and two syllables such as sports, food, school subjects etc. 

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Title:  Bunnies and Eggs

Grade 1, Music

Time: 1-2 classes

Critical Learning
1. Two eighth notes (words with two syllables) are played more quickly than one quarter note (words with one syllable).

2. Two eighth notes and one quarter note each take up one beat. How many claps do we need with the word “bunny,” “egg,” etc.?

3. Which claps go faster, bunny or egg?

Curriculum Expectations
C1.  Creating and Performing: apply the creative process to create and perform music for a variety of purposes, using the elements and techniques of music.

C1.1 sing songs in unison and play simple accompaniments for music from a wide variety of diverse cultures, styles, and historical periods

C1.2 apply the elements of music when singing, playing, and moving

C1.3 create compositions for a specific purpose and a familiar audience

Learning Goals
At the end of this lesson, I can:

1. Rearrange words that represent quarter and eighth notes
2. Perform a 4 beat rhythm two times in a rondo form

Prior Knowledge and Skills

Keeping the beat to a variety of songs, poems and chants

Terminology

Ti-ti

Ta

Beat

Rhythm

Materials

Music K-8 Vol.17 no. 4 “Shaky, Shaky Egg”

Shakers

Minds On  

Show the students the foam bunny and egg and ask them what they think we will be singing about today?

Action! 

1.    Teach the students the song “Shaky, Shaky Egg.”

2.     As a class, put four foam bunnies and eggs on a music stand and ask the students to figure out how many shakes they need to match the words bunny and egg.  After students have discovered that you need one shake for egg and two for bunny, create a variety of ostinatos(repeated rhythms)  and practice them with the class.

3.    Put students into groups of four and give them four foam shapes ( a variety of eggs and bunnies). Assign each group a letter starting with B, C, D etc. Have each group practice shaking their rhythms with their shakers.

4.    In their groups students will make their own rhythm pattern and practice it.

Consolidation

Have the whole class perform a rondo with the song “Shaky, Shaky Egg” as the A part and each students rhythm as the B, C, D etc… part. The order of the performance will go A, B, A, C, A, D, A, E, A, F, etc.

Assessment

Assess students accuracy in playing their rhythm and ability to stay with the beat of the song

Differentiation (DI):

For students struggling, have them recite the words only for the rondo

To extend the activity, have students perform their rhythm with no words and using body percussion

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Here are some pictures of materials that I use in my class to teach rhythm to my grade 1 students:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I can still remember the exact moment I found out that I was successful in landing my first LTO. I had only been on the supply list for about a month and was less than a year out of teacher’s college. On my drive home from the interview, my phone rang so I frantically pulled over and found myself accepting a position teaching Kindergarten for the rest of the year. This was the moment I had been waiting for since I was three years old. My childhood, teenage and adult dreams were all coming true. As a little girl, I used to arrange all of my stuffed animals, “my kids”, in assigned seating for circle time where I would recite the exact same songs and lessons that my daycare teachers did. As I got older, my stuffed animal students all had names and personalities, which I still remember to this day. I would teach them, make work sheets for them, complete them wrong, and then mark them with a red pen which I had borrowed from my mom’s office. Can you tell I was an only child?

Here’s me, circa 1996 with my very first class. If you told this little girl she’d have her own class one day, she’d tell you she didn’t doubt it one bit. The resume building started as soon as I was deemed old enough to babysit. I spent most of my teenage and university years working with kids, loving it along the way and always knowing where I was headed.

Now I was 24 years old and it was all coming together. I was beyond excited to get started. Finally, I could put everything I’d learned in school, everything I’d practiced in teacher’s college and everything I’d pinned on my Pinterest boards into action! I’d have a place to call home, familiar faces every day and most importantly, students to call my own – even if just for a while.

As a new teacher, permanent employment seems so far in the distance that I often don’t even think about it. The reality is that our profession is one that many people want to be part of – and of course they do! Teachers get to change lives every day and our payment is to have our own lives changed by our students in return. It is this life-changing passion that we need to hold on tight to, even in times we feel discouraged. The road to permanent employment may be a long one, but the journey there is not one bit less important. For now, I’m proud to be an LTO teacher.

I began my first day as a Kindergarten teacher and immediately fell in love. I put everything I had into my planning, my classroom and my students. I woke up each morning feeling excited for the day ahead. I arrived early and stayed late after school. I spent hours thinking about what I could do next, do more or do better. I spent way too much money on things for the classroom, which my bank account can vouch for. I probably talked all my family and friends’ ears off about my class. Those kids became my kids. I knew them, I loved them and I genuinely cared for them. I lost sleep over them. I still think about them all the time.

As an LTO teacher, I will change lives and my life will be changed. Whether I spend three months or an entire year with a class, they become a part of my story and change who I am as a teacher and a person forever – and that’s what three-year-old me knew all along.