Key Stage 1: Lesson 3
Musicroom is dedicated to helping you provide your child with a rich and rounded education, even during school closures. Every week we’ll be providing free outstanding, fun and rewarding music lessons for Key Stages 1, 2 and 3 that can be taught at home. Simple to use and no musical expertise is required!
This week, from Rhinegold Education, a Key Stage 1 (ages 5-7) lesson that gets us grooving to funky beats and rhythms and, at Key Stage 2 (ages 7-11), an investigation of musical storms!
Learning objective: to know the difference between rhythm and beat. To find the rhythm and beat of different songs.
Length: ½ hour
1. The beat of music is like a steady heartbeat that keeps going the same way through the music.
2. Let’s keep the beat!
Listen to the audio clip below and join in as instructed. Try keeping the beat using different ways as the audio instructs.
Keep a very steady beat, with your hands or with your feet. Bllink your eyes or nod your head, clap or tap or flap instead!
3. Let’s keep the rhythm!
Rhythm is related to syllables in songs and chants. Each syllable is clapped when you clap along to the rhythm of a song. One way to show young children to do this, is to encourage them to ‘catch’ each word as it comes out of their mouths.
Listen to the audio clip below and join in as instructed. Try copying the rhythms in different ways as the audio instructs.
Rhythm is what it’s all about, catch the words as they come out. Sometimes very fast, sometimes slow, sometimes STOP! Sometimes go.
4. Let’s put it all together!
Check this out!
Encourage the children to first of all, play along with the beat. They can choose to nod, clap, blink or, perhaps they could change movements, copying you.
Now ask them to ‘catch the words’ to show the rhythm as they learned above in Stage 3.
5. Take it further!
Choose another song you both like and see if you can play along with the beat and then the rhythm. You can change from beat to rhythm and back again part of the way through the song to increase challenge if necessary.
By Rebecca White for Rhinegold Education.
Key Stage 2: Lesson 3
1. It’s stormy out there!
Play your child the following video of Rossin’s awesome storm from the William Tell Overture!
2. Explain that this music is written to represent a storm. Discuss the following questions with them:
• What happens to the volume (dynamics) of the music? Why do you think the composer chooses to do this? What do you think the woodwind represent at the beginning and end of the music? What about the strings?
3. Now, hold onto your hats and check out this storm made by a choir!
Ask your child:
– How are the sounds made?
– Can they make their own storm sounds with their bodies, starting from light wind to light rain, to heavy rain, to thunder and back again? They could use one or two examples from the video but challenge them to create their own sounds as well.
4. Make your own storm!
Look at these picture of parts of a storm. Go and find safe household objects that your child can ‘play’ to represent each picture (some ideas may be waving card, blowing through a straw or across a bottle neck, rattling a teapot, drumming fingers on a biscuit, or unwrapping sellotape).
You could even play your mini musical representations one after another to create a little piece showing the evolution of a storm from beginning to end!
By Rebecca White for Rhinegold Education.