Submitted by Becky Olson, Union Grove, Wisconsin
Idea posted November 15, 2002
I just tried a new way to teach dotted rhythms, and it really worked well!!! My 4th graders had a song this week that included dotted rhythms, which are always hard to explain when the kids haven't worked much with fractions yet, so here is what I did...
For each class, I cut out 8 circles from manila drawing paper. I put dots on the circles with a brown marker to simulate chocolate chips. When the kids came in today, we reviewed eighth notes beamed together in pairs and clapped an even eighth note rhythm. When we looked at the book, the kids didn't know what to call the dotted eighth/sixteenth pattern... SO... I called two good friends up to the front of the room. I asked them if they were buddies, and of course they were, so I had them stand arms' length apart and put their hands on each others' shoulders. We talked about how they now looked like beamed eighth notes. Then I gave each of the girls one of my "Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies that I worked so hard to make for you." The class agreed that each girl had the same size cookie, and that they were equal. Next, I took out my scissors and took back the second cookie and cut it in half, giving half to the first girl (who already had a whole cookie) and only half back to the second girl. I engineered it so that the first girl held the whole cookie to the right of the half (to show the dot). Now the girls were still beamed together, but they no longer had equal shares. I told the second girl to take her hand off of her friend's shoulder and act like she was reaching for her other half-cookie. The class picked up right away that it looked just like the dotted eighth/sixteenth pattern in the book. Now we had a picture for the visual learners, and I went on to explain that the one with the most cookie gets to hold their sound longer.
We tried it again with a new pair of friends and this time changed the cookie distribution to represent sixteenth/dotted eighth. By the end of class, they could read the uneven rhythm in either pattern and apply it back into the song. I used the extra cookies to quiz them at the end of class.
They loved this activity and caught on to the dotted rhythm so much more easily than any way I've tried to explain it before. I told them that next time we would learn a song about friends and Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies - Teresa's song (from Music K-8, Vol. 10, No. 5), of course! Anyway, this lesson worked really well, and that made my day!