Submitted by Emily Weed, Durham, Connecticut
Idea posted March 1, 2002
MUSICAL MILKSHAKE was something I learned during my student teaching. It may be a familiar game that everyone knows as something different. All you do is play kid songs they should know like "Row Row Row Your Boat," "She'll Be Comin' Round The Mountain," whatever, and play them in different tempos and different registers of the piano. Just make up different accompaniments and styles for each one. The rules are that students can move their own way but they have to be moving to a steady beat. When the music stops, they must freeze.
FUDGE is a game that I learned from John Feierabend at his steady beat workshop. The CD he used with it was First Steps In Classical Music: Keeping The Beat. All of the songs are short and have the tempo of quarter note equals 120-136. There are a bunch of games that you get with the CD that are written on the inside cover. This one is fun because it reinforces simple steady beat patting on different parts of the body, but they have to pay close attention because the leader is always one motion ahead of the class. When the leader wants to change a motion, he/she says, "Fudge." They move to their new motion while the class moves to the motion the leader was just performing.
MUSIC MEMORY would be like the memory game most children play where you have to turn over the cards to find matches, and once you find a match, you have to say what it is. You could do this with notes on a staff, music symbols, instruments... whatever. And the person at the end with the most matches wins. This could be something done in small groups, and would also work when you have a substitute.
A NOTE RELAY is just something I am developing right now to work on reading notes on the staff with third and fourth graders. I was thinking of teaching so many notes and then making quarter notes and putting the letter name in the middle. There would be two teams - could be three or so if you have room. Each team would have a box or bag to choose notes out of so they can't see what notes they are choosing. The first player from each team would go first and pick a note. They would run to the board to place it on the staff and then run back and tag the next person on their team who would pick the next note. The team would just keep going until all the notes were chosen and displayed correctly on the staff. This is just an idea and I haven't actually done it yet.