Candy Building Bricks

Rhythmic Building Bricks or Blocks are often used as compositional tools in elementary music classrooms.

Developed by Carl Orff's fellow teacher, Gunild Keetman, these simple 2-beat patterns use quarter notes, quarter rests, and paired eighth notes (and sometimes a half note). These are elemental rhythms most commonly found in children's rhymes, fingerplays, and simple songs and can be combined to create more complex rhythmic patterns.

Rhythmic building bricks break down composition into small, manageable units, enabling students to create their own pieces from simple patterns. This approach reduces the intimidation of composing and encourages creativity through structure. By experimenting with different combinations of rhythmic bricks, students explore concepts like repetition and arrangement, fostering creative ownership of their musical output. The use of repeated patterns helps students internalize how repetition contributes to musicality and familiarity. Additionally, rhythmic bricks allow for differentiation, as teachers can adapt pattern length, rhythmic complexity, and instrumentation to meet diverse learning needs.

Specific Learning Goals

• Rhythm:  Building bricks should follow natural speech (the way a word is spoken). 
• Repetition: Musical themes often repeat.
• Form Exploration: Try various elemental forms of aabb, abab, abba, aaab, and abac. 

I Get It, Now What? 

Rhythmic Building Bricks/Blocks are often thematic and should always use natural speech (which is why names don't work well as there are too many accents and pickups that don't fit the elemental quarter notes and eighth notes). 

Small groups of students are given 4 building bricks (this will create an 8-beat rhythm). The rhythms should be ones already learned. They practice arranging them, speaking them, adding body percussion and perhaps transferring these to non-pitched percussion. They may be used as a contrasting section to a short speech piece or song. 

These candy building bricks/blocks are perfect for fall and winter holidays and include some variations including sixteenth notes! Please note this will force a copy.

Using iconic or rhythmic notation, various voices, elemental forms, movement, non-pitched percussion, barred percussion, movement, and improvisation, this is a "kitchen sink" lesson using everything in the classroom you CHOOSE to use. You can use this with your first graders to upper elementary, varying the complexity included in the lesson. You can get the full slide set with all of the visuals on my Patreon community.  Add your favorite book about winter and voila! A lesson with no prep!

Enjoy!

If You Find a Leaf

This is such a beautiful book by Aimee Sicuro! The slides are available (FREE!) here!

Go Fish Rhythm Card Game

 I love card games - to use in rotations, as a sub game, as a jumping off point for composition! 

This one is Go Fish - grab your copy here - this will force a copy. 

Here is Memory - another favorite! This will force a copy, also! 

Enjoy!

Pass the Pumpkin *Updated!

 Pass the Pumpkin is a fall favorite and I have remade the slides in google slides with some small tweaks to the visuals and the directions. 

Click this link for the google slides - please know this will force you to make a copy. 

Enjoy!

Alien Q and A

Improvisation is essentially spontaneous composition. The art and act of creating an expressive musical statement in real time adhering to some kind of structure.

 Question and Answer is a common improvisation technique in music.  In the world of Orff Schulwerk we begin with imitation and exploration of an idea or concept. Then we add label and improvise using that idea and concept. 

When students are ready to improvise, where do we begin? 

I like to begin with this:

Teach song and step the beat in place.

Sing and walk the beat. 

While singing, walk to face a partner.

Show 8 fingers and do a "countdown" demonstrating rhythmic alien language. 

Something like this:

With partner, decide who is going first (rock, paper, scissors to determine "winner"). Show fingers again, first partner improvises over the 8 beats using alien language. Second partner answers them with their 8 beats. Don't worry if they are not truly performing question and answer yet - it will come. 

Repeat several times before defining question and answer technique. 

Repeat game with question and answer technique.

Repeat activity with body percussion. Consider transferring to non-pitched percussion.

Hope you enjoy!

Hike by Pete Oswald

 Hike by Pete Oswald (of The Good Egg and The Bad Seed fame) is a beautiful (almost) wordless picture book. 

Follow a Dad and son into the mountains as they witness the magic of the wilderness, overcome challenges, and plant a tree to give back to the forest. This beautiful book is full of possibilities for movement and vocal and barred instrument exploration (images that move down or up, small and large trees, mountain peaks, hills and of course those beautiful winding trails).  Or, have small groups create movement tableaus for different pages or create 2-beat building bricks about what the father and son are doing or seeing.  

Perfect for back to school talks about summer trips or for Earth Day.  

This would work well with Trees 'Round the Earth from my new book, Singing Waters, Dancing Flames published by Beatin Path Publications.

For a clearer image of the song, click here to download.

Another great tie in would be the beautiful canon, This Pretty Planet.

Or use Seeds of Love by Gemini

Another extension idea using the book Planting a Rainbow by Lois Ehlert, post click here

To see a video of Planting a Rainbow and the Seeds song by Gemini, click here. 

What is your favorite song or activity about nature? Drop a comment below. 

Enjoy!

Books and Music for Ramadan

Ramadan is a holiday celebrated by Muslims around the world. It begins at sundown April 2 and ends May 1 this year. Through fasting, Muslims believe  their relationship with God will be strengthened, as it makes up one of the Five Pillars of Islam.

This 3-minute video shows children sharing information about Ramadan:

This book is the story of Najma, a girl who rises each morning of Ramadan to the drum beat of her neighborhood's musaharati. He wakes each family for the pre-dawn meal before the day of fasting. Najma wants be a musaharati herself one day, but the job has never been one for girls.  This is a lovely story of resilience, determination, and courage.

This is a great read aloud of the book:

Lisa Zargarpur wrote a beautiful article for the American Center for Elemental Music and Movement (ACEMM) with a song for Ramadan.  Check it out here! 

Hena Khan is one of my favorite authors!  

I fell in love with Crescent Moons and Pointed Minarets a few years ago and wrote an activity I put in my Painted Music book.  

Here is a link to the pdf with the above images and the 2-beat building bricks.

Hena Khan has several other books I love! 

Ramadan Mubarak

Enjoy!