Printed from the MusicK8.com Idea Bank

Basic Chord Lessons

Submitted by Jennifer Schroeder, Fall River, Wisconsin

Idea posted 2003-06-13

I've been working on the basic concept of chords with my second graders. We've talked about the number of each note in a scale, and we use the song Whacky Birthday (from Music K-8, Vol. 13, No. 1). This is written out in the magazine, but in reality is just a simple chord progression of I IV VI V I. I wrote the chords on a piece of poster board with the notes stacked up over each roman numeral. The students know the rhythm after hearing it a bunch of times, so I simply point to the chords as they happen. The students play the notes on the Boomwhackers® or xylophones.

There's a lot you can do with this: talk about building chords in triads, listen for their different sounds and how the sound of V makes you want to go back to I, et cetera. Using the xylophones works well with this too because they can *see* the triads skipping over notes if you try to play all three notes at once. My kids like to try to play a chord with one hand and 3 mallets.