Giant Beat Strips

This post has been a long time coming!  Here's an activity that my 1st graders worked on WAY back in September.  Let me preface that I saw my first graders when they were in kindergarten almost every day for 20 minutes (well, 2/3 days.  We have a 3 day specials rotation and the pe teacher and I switch half way through our 45 minute periods.)  I LOVE the high frequency at which I see my kinders.  Retention of concepts is AMAZING (go figure), I am able to build a really good foundation with them and we're able to get through all the comparatives.  Because of this, I was able to present ta  and ti-ti  in the first week of October.  

Here is a preparation activity that I used for the first time this year.  First, I made HUGE beat strips.  First, using "Cobbler Cobble" (after much physical and kinesthetic preparation) we derived the sounds on the beats using the chant/spoken version of "Cobbler Cobbler".

Here's the spoken version:

I do use this version in kindergarten for steady beat, I love the melody!  They don't have trouble converting to the spoken one and it's a great review of singing vs. speaking.  Here's one of the sung versions that I've been known to use:

First, as a class, we derived the number of sounds on a beat using shoes.  Here you can see one of my little guys figuring out if the last beat has one sound (shoe) or two sounds (shoes):

Here's another class's final product.  The thing that's nice about "Cobbler Cobbler" is that each line is the same!

The next lesson we used "Queen, Queen Caroling" in which the 1st and 4th phrases/lines are the same and middle two phrases/lines are the same.  Here's the chant:

And hers' them working on the beat chart:

 Final product:

Next we applied it to "Bee Bee Bumble Bee".  Again, we have a spoken and a sung version.  When doing this activity we used the spoken version.  It alleviated any confusion of rhythm and pitch direction that way.

Here's the spoken version:

 Here's the sung version:

Since this was the third time they did it we were able to have multiple students working on placing "bees" on different beats at the same time:

And here's the final product.

Finally, before we presented ta and ti-ti we applied this to "Apple Tree."  Here's the song:

And here's the beat chart:

If you noticed with this beat chart there are different colored hearts on the charts.  I have a total of 6 different colored beat charts: red, pink, blue, purple, orange, green.  In the lesson immediately BEFORE we presented ta  and ti-ti I broke them into color groups (see previous colors) and working in these small groups with the beat charts they derived sounds on a beat.  This was a good activity for me to able to check for comprehension.  Those students that really "got it" were able to help others that we're "one the fence" with their understanding and afterwards the kiddos that were a little gray in comprehension with the concept of number of sounds on one beat really "got it."

I hope you all are having a great week!  I don't know about your kiddos but mine are ready for Winter break!!!  Aye, aye aye!!!