Body Percussion

Music is organized sound.  I like to give students opportunities to organize sound and icons for sounds before we work with organizing notation.  One of the ways I do that is to create sound songs.  We take a basic grid and brainstorms sounds we can make with our bodies (APPROPRIATE sounds *giggle*) and then draw shapes and simple picture to represent them.  We draw them into the grid so that they are organized and then perform them for each other.  FUN!   Another thing I like to do is work with ready icons for body percussion.  I introduce this in Kindergarten, but we review it in 1st and 2nd grades and add a composing element to it.  Until recently I used a pretty old set of body percussion clip art to create a slide show.  Here's what the new version looks like:

I used this with some classes this week and they loved it!  We talked about one sound to the beat means a quarter note and one picture in each square.  After we add barred eighth notes or two sounds on one beat we'll take some time to compose our own.  I'll print out little copies of all the body percussion actions and they will place them on the squares in the grid and perform.

When we finish or as we begin to use this activity just to review or as a warm-up I'll add some body percussion worksheets to the end of class or to workstations.  I'll be using these:

 

Quick enough to do in the last ten minutes of class or at a workstation, I really like making connections to reading and writing AND music.  Check out the Body Percussion set HERE.