A child's play can teach many skills that are needed for life. A child's musical development begins in play as well. His or her sense of pitch and rhythm are developed through different kinds of games.
Children Learn Sense of Rhythm Through Play
A sense of rhythm is often described as the ability to hear and reproduce rhythmical sounds. This physical reaction to music starts developing very early in life. Infants clap and bounce to the beat. Toddlers can dance along to a song. There are even many music and motion classes like Kindermusik and MusicTogether that can give babies and toddlers more musical experiences.
Developing a sense of beat can take a variety of forms for a young child. Obvious ways that children learn a sense of rhythm are through dance, chants, and singing. Less obvious ways that children learn a sense of rhythm are jumping rope, skipping, and reciting rhymes.
Using What Children Already Know
As children grow older and become part of a more organized system of learning music, they usually have a pretty developed sense of rhythm but they don’t understand what they know or how to apply it. Many times, in music lessons, a child learns to somehow separate his or her sense of rhythm from reading the rhythms on the page. There are so many new things to learn that the student seems to forget what they already know naturally.
There are some ways to solve this problem. The most popular way is to assign words to simple rhythms to show the connection between the chanting that the child has already done in play and the new musical notation that looks so foreign.
Some of the most common words used are:
Quarter note = pie
Two eighth notes = ap-ple
Triplet = cho-co-late
Eighth note followed by two sixteenths = straw-ber-ry
Two sixteenths followed by one eighth = but-ter-scotch
Four sixteenth notes = hu-ckle-ber-ry
This system works well because the whole system relates back to pie, just like all of the notes relate back to a quarter note. The only downside to this system is that some students may want to play quarter notes short because the word “pie” is such a short word. Simply observing the student and reminding him or her of how long a quarter note is can solve this.
Transferring to Traditional Notation
Once the student becomes comfortable with this rhythmical aid, the teacher can begin to transfer over to the more traditional beat counting. By inserting the middle step into learning basic rhythms, teachers and parents can avoid the disconnect many children create between the rhythms that they experience out in the world and the rhythms that they see in their music.
Children learn so much from play naturally. By using what they already know and applying it to music lessons, students can avoid some of the difficulty that comes in learning to read musical notation and go straight to enjoying the music.
Sources
Jacobson, Jeanine M. Van Nuys: Alfred, 2006.
Ghazarian Skaggs, Hazel. "Teaching Rhythm." The Art of Teaching Piano. New York: Yorktown Music, 2004. 39-45.
Amy Schumaker - Amy is a young musician based out of Philadelphia. A native of northeast Ohio, she went to Capital University Conservatory of Music, where ...
