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Patti P., Hawaii

I thought I’d share this fun thing from one of my classes: We have recently started working on Reading Rhythm. The assignment this week was clapping and voicing MOR. They decided that singles should be milk, doubles sugar, and quads cappuccino. They came back this week with pages of MOR, and were virtually flawless with their words. The youngest one in the class looked at on of the lines with a lot of quads and quipped “That’s a lot of cappuccino!”

These are kids who had some music reading experience, so add words just made it more fun for them. This was totally on their instigation, and added an element of fun for precisely that reason.

Terah W., Kansas

Love this! We have been adding verbal ideas since I read an Aussie Teacher’s question of ‘what do you Americans use?…we use “Tea, Coffee, Cappucino”. And being a coffee lover, we use this one now. Marching to this is way more fun than just Left, left, left, right, left!

The cool thing has been that it has prompted lots of suggestions which seems to underscore our conviction that these rythmic ‘hooks’ are surrounding us all the time! Great conversation starter and often enough ‘proof’ to convince the most opinionated that they, too, are ‘musical’!

Laura L., California

Love that! I have sometimes used the words Cheese (Singles) Pizza (Doubles) and Pepperoni (Quads)! It is a great tool for students who have some challenge with the rhythm. And lots of fun!

Gordon Harvey, Australia

With my little kids I used to use “Moo”, “Baa Baa” and “Cock-a-doodle”.

Personally, I don’t like “coffee” for doubles as much as “pizza”. If you think about the way you naturally say each of these words, “pizza” is more like the proper rhythm of a double. To get “coffee” to sound like two evenly spaced 1/8 notes you have to alter the way you would normally say it (unless you are Homer Simpson;-), which to me is putting the cart before the horse. This may sound pedantic, but if a student comes back the following week saying “coffee” like a 1/16 followed by a 1/8 note, it’s a bit of extra effort to fix.

Jennifer L., California

How fun to read about what other teachers are doing with this!

I use fruit in a lot of my classes: pear (singles), apple (doubles), watermelon (quads). Everyone gets it, and everyone loves it – kids and parents alike.

I’ve recently started asking my kids to come up with some of their own. Here are a couple examples of what they’ve come up with:

• bee (singles), sow bug (doubles), caterpillar (quads)
• math (singles), science (doubles), social studies (quads)

When we added the half note, this kid suggested that we continue using his school-related words and add “P.E.” for the half notes. So we slurred the “P” and the “E” together for our half notes (twice as long as singles), and it worked great.

These kids are so creative! 🙂