Teaching Strategies and Approaches
Provide child-led opportunities for learners to explore and be creative with sound:
- Set up a music/sound area(indoors or outdoors) with a variety of instruments and objects for the children to explore, including a selection of tuned and untuned percussion and materials with a variety of textures and surfaces.
- Percussion instruments can be organised by timbre (shake, tap, ting, boom) and children can begin to categorisethe instruments with visuals for support.
- Encourage learners to explore contrasting sounds with visuals for basic music concepts displayed (loud/quiet, fast/slow, high/low).
- Provide opportunities for children to use materials to create different sounds and to make their own instruments. Materials could include plastic bottles & lids, plastic boxes, cardboard boxes, buckets, pots & lids, wooden blocks, spoons, sand paper, pencils, straws, sticks, rubber bands etc.
- Encourage learners to compare and contrast sounds and to describe the sounds they have created e.g. What happens if you swap the spoon for a straw? Can you use the materials to make a shake sound? What could you use to make a loud sound? How could you make that sound quieter?
Engage learners in adult directed group activities to explore sounds created by voice, instruments and body percussion:
- Model a steady beat/pulse using body percussion, actions or a percussion instrument.
- Provide opportunities for learners to develop their sense of pulse by keeping a steady beat with movement e.g. using simple actions, marching on the spot or walking, clapping their hands or tapping their knees.
- Support learners to understand the concept of pulse/beat in music by relating it to the regular pulse/heartbeat in our bodies-learners can tap heart shapes to the beat whilst singing/chanting to reinforce this concept.
- Give learners opportunities to experience beat at different tempos by singing/chanting a song/rhyme faster or slower.
- Support learners to keep a steady beat using a percussion instrument, e.g. claves or drum, while singing a simple song.
- Introduce rhythm to learners as patterns of short and long sounds –model and ask learners to copy rhythm patterns by clapping the rhythm of words from short, repetitive rhymes.
- Support learners to understand both concepts by combining beat and rhythm when chanting a rhyme e.g. half the group can keep a steady beat on their knees, while the other half clap the rhythm.
- Introduce the rhythm names for 1 beat (ta) 2 half beats (tete) using familiar rhymes with a repetitive rhythm e.g. Buster Buster, Engine Engine.
- Provide opportunities for learners to follow pictorial symbols which represent the rhythm of a familiar and repetitive rhyme.
End of Level Benchmarks
When communicating ideas and feelings through creative music activities:
- uses voice to explore sound and rhythm, for example, hums, whispers, sings;
- chooses different musical instruments to play such as chime bar, drum or body percussion, exploring sound and rhythm by, for example, clapping, tapping;
- uses technology to capture sound, for example, audio recorders, microphones, apps and other software.
Interdisciplinary links
LIT 0-01a / LIT 0-11a / LIT 0-20a
LIT 0-02a / ENG 0-03a
MNU 0-02a, MTH 0-13a
HWB 0-10a, HWB 0-11a, HWB 0-14a
HWB 0-21a, HWB 0-22a, HWB 0-23a
TCH 0-01a, TCH 0-10a
