Introducing Quarter Notes/Rests Essential Questions and Understandings

 
• Essential Question – What does sound look like in music?
• Essential Question – What does silence look like in music?
• Essential Question – How can we stay together when performing music?
• Understanding – Students recognize and can identify various lengths of notes and rests
(quarter notes/rests).
• Understanding – Students will know the duration of the same group of notes and rests
(quarter).
• Understanding – Students will be able to perform (verbal counting) a given rhythmic
example in time with the rest of the class.


Procedure 
• Students will be seated in a semicircle around the room so that they can all see my whiteboard/projector, but I can see their hands and feet.
• Once students are seated, I will turn on a metronome (steady beat). I will wait to see if some of them start tapping their feet, then will call that out and will take students through the process of what that is (the beat), how their foot taps, and what the beat is called.
• We will talk about how to count the beats (on-e, tw-o, thr-ee, fo-ur – each number receiving two pulses), and while tapping our feet, we will count various numbers of beats (4, 8, 12, then counting in groups of four (1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4)).
• The next step is to introduce visual representation of the beat. I will draw quarter notes up on the whiteboard and will explain how they look, what they are called, and how we will count/tap those, just like we have been doing.
• Then, we will make explicit how the foot taps pair with the counting – have the students identify where their foot is (down) while they say the number and how it goes up exactly in between each beat. We will also visually demonstrate this by drawing in down and up arrows along with our quarter notes and beat counts.
• At this point, we will address silence in music – what it is called (rest) and what it looks like. We’ll show how it would visually be counted when writing out rhythms.
• I will display some rhythm lines (see attachment 1), and we will count/foot tap them out loud.
• We will then play a game called “Mess up, drop out” – see evaluation section for more information.


Important Questions
• What does our foot do for every beat?
• Why are we tapping our foot?
• What does one beat look like?
• What is a silence in music called?

 
Evaluation
For our evaluation, we will play a game called “Mess up, drop out.” All of the students will stand up. We will count rhythms displayed up on the projector. When a student makes a mistake, they will sit down and stop counting. This is on the honor system, so no points or prizes or anything will be awarded to the winners. The game continues until one person is left. Several rounds are played. This will be just an informal formative assessment. This game allows me to see if there are certain rhythms or patterns that many kids have trouble with. It is also helpful to see if a lot of kids sit down right away or if it takes a while for students to start dropping out. I can identify if there are students who are regularly among the first to sit down or the last to keep standing.


Modifications
One modification I would make in this lesson would be to slow down the tempo if students are having trouble. Because this may be their first time doing an activity like this where they have to count in time, it will likely be easier for them to do at a slower speed.