Teach Primary Issue 18.2

Ben Connor is a deputy headteacher at a primary school in Bury, Greater Manchester. He is a trained music specialist and has been teaching for 13 years in various schools. children have grasped the four-beat pulse (4/4), play them pieces of music which represent alternative pulses. For example: • Two-beat pulse (2/2): Help by The Beatles, or Jingle Bells • Three-beat pulse (3/4): any waltz (I often play clips of Viennese waltz dances from Strictly Come Dancing ) • Six-beat pulse (6/8): House of the Rising Sun by The Animals, We are the Champions by Queen Tempo is how slow or fast a piece of music is. To explore what this means in practice, have children copy a simple beat pattern and change the tempo. Play the beat slow, stop, then play it fast. Experiment with hand signals to change the tempo from fast to slow and vice versa. Rhythm is a mixture of long and short notes which create a recognisable pattern. Once understanding of beat and pulse has been established, move on to rhythm and duration. Get your pupils to play/ hit their instruments once and listen carefully. How long before the instrument stops making noise? Can we make the sound last longer or stop sooner? How? Once you’ve discussed these questions, ask the children to individually experiment with mixing long and short sounds to create a simple beat and rhythm. Next, play ‘Don’t Clap This One Back’ (see tinyurl. com/tp-TeachingMusic ) but have the children play/hit instead of clapping. You can also try a ‘call and response’ game, where one child is in charge and plays a short rhythm that the others have to copy. Rotate the lead role around the clas s. Tuned instruments Beat, pulse, tempo, rhythm and duration can all be taught/repeated using tuned instruments. The most effective instrument to use is the glockenspiel. These are relatively cheap, can be shared one between two children and are simple to play. Use your glockenspiels to recap some of the earlier activities before moving on to learning about pitch. Pitch is how high or low a note is. It is related to the frequency of a sound: the higher the frequency, the higher the pitch. Simply put, the larger an instrument or key/bar of an instrument, the slower it will vibrate and the lower the pitch will be. When introducing pitch, I always use a large xylophone. Play the keys from top to bottom/bottom to top, so that children can visualise that the lower notes make lower sounds. Play a game of Low/ Middle/High. Ask the children to close their eyes while you play a note on the xylophone; can they hear whether it is low/ middle/high on the keys? If you have a range of pitched instruments (hand bells, chime bars, etc), hand them out to a small group of pupils. Ask the children to play their instruments one at a time. Can they sort themselves into pitch order? TP MUS I C S P E C I A L QUICK TIPS FOR classroom management 1 Seven seconds of sound When you first give out instruments, pupils will want to make a noise. From experience, they will do it whether you want them to or not. It’s also important that children do get a chance to freely explore the sounds an instrument makes. So give the instruments out, put your fingers in your ears and tell the children they have seven seconds to make as much noise as they want. This gets it out of their system, ready for purposeful sound in the rest of the lesson. 2 Crowd control Once the initial seven seconds of madness are over, you now need to establish hand signals for when you want pupils to stop playing. Develop a clear routine, linked to existing classroom practices. For example, say, “When I hold my hand up, put all the instruments [or beaters] carefully down on the tables”. Practise this routine to lay out your expectations and be clear about what happens if children don’t respond promptly enough. 3 Purposeful noise Finally, explain the role of the conductor in a choir or orchestra: their role is to set the tempo and introduce the instruments at the correct time. Split the class into groups. Have them ‘ready’, with beaters poised to play or instruments ready. They can only play when you ‘conduct’. Point to each group in turn and have them play either one beat, or a simple rhythm. This gets the children used to playing at the right time. www.teachwire.net | 63 @bbcteaching