Assignment #9

1.The following are guidelines that can be used to help teachers generate ideas for students to learn music through rhythmic bodily response activities.
.Encourage the child's natural inclination to move. For example, student's naturally want to get out of their seats or if they are sitting for too long they are squirming around trying to make themselves more comfortable. Teacher's should take advantage of this situation and should use the student's eagerness to move to incorporate music and movement in their lessons.
.Encourage the natural use of speech, gesture, and body language to express thoughts and emotions. Allow the students to feel the music and respond to it with whatever comes natural to them, which will in turn bring out their creative ideas.
.Encourage the use of various levels of energy (dynamics) and timing in movement, speech and gesture. Encourage the students to move to the music in the way that they feel about it at the time, usually when children hear fast paced music, they will move that way or sing that way as well.
.Allow children to explore and find ways to "live" particular elements of music in movement. this means that children should not be directed necessarily on how to move to music, they should simply just be encouraged to move and whatever movements come out of that are their own creation and this shoulld be supported.
.Identify elements, concepts, or other aspects of music that children should experience.
.Pay attention to children's individual responses. Because children are creative in a variety of ways, they each have something creative to bring to the table. Therefore, encourage their individual creativity and have that reflect on the other students.
.Allow children freedom and opportunities to express music with their bodies in spontaneous ways. It is okay for the student's to act "silly" and this should be encouraged because a child's true creativity will be brought out and children will know this is acceptible behavior in the classroom and their ideas can fully be expressed.
.Encourage the completion of structured tasks that will, in turn, result in musical learning. It is good to have openness and freedom in the classroom, especially with music, but it is important to have a criteria for the children to follow to make sure they gain every musical concept possible to accompany their learning. In the end, it will only better their education not restrict it.
.Choose music for rhythmic activities that causes children to respond instictively. An example of a instinctive response is tapping of their feet to music, and this is encouraged because it will let their natural creativity and response to music come out and this will lead to them expressing themselves musically.
2. A locomotor skill is to move from one place to another. A non-locomotor skill is to move within a stationary position.
3. The four stages in children developing body awareness include the following:
1. movement as an expression of problem solving
2. movement as an expression of imagery
3. movement with no external beat
4.movement to a beat with a sense of timing
4. The musical concepts that can be taught through movement activities include the concept of the following:
.beat/meter,
.fast, slow, getting faster, getting slower
.accents
.dynamics
.rhythm patterns
.melodic contour
5. A lesson that involves the concept of teaching students rhythm patterns begins with the teacher introducing this concept by having her students "step" the rhythm patterns. For example, the teacher will play music using an instrument such as the piano or drum and will have her students move to the notes of the music. Specifically, the teacher can have her students walk, gallop, skip, hop or do any of the following movements in conjuction with her playing the notes. Therefore, the teacher can assign a note to a certain movement such as a quarter note to a walking step. Once teh students practice moving around the room according to the notes being played, the teacher can combine the notes and a rhythm "pattern" is created. One game of activity presented in this lesson that a teacher can use to express this idea is the stop and go game which involves the students moving according to the musical notes and stopping as soon as the teacher stops playing her instrument. This game can be done in groups or as a class and is similar to musical chairs with the stopping and starting of the music.
After these games are done to emphasize the rhythm patterns, the teacher can then have the students translate the movemnt words into rhythmic notation. For example, the teacher can assign different note values to the words of songs and have the students step the rhythmn while singing the song. Another way the teacher can emphasize this concept is by assigning different words like the childrens names or seasons to note values so they see the relation in all words not just movement words.