Assignment 9

1. In the textbook there was a list of ideas to help teachers come up with ideas for how students learn music through rhythmic bodily response activities.
• Encourage the child’s natural inclination to move.
• Encourage the natural use of speech, gesture, and body language to express thoughts and emotions.
• Pay attention to children’s individual response. Sometimes a child’s response is so imaginative that it is worth having the whole class try it.
• Allow children freedom and opportunities to express music with their bodies in spontaneous ways.
• Encourage the completion of structured tasks that will, in turn, result in musical learning.
• Choose music for rhythm activities that causes children to respond instinctively.
o Some things that this could include is like doing the chicken dance while learning the song
• Identify elements, concepts, or other aspects of music that children should experience
o Working something over and over again so that the children learn it
• Allow children to explore and find ways to “live” particular elements of the music in movement
o Something you could do is work on scale by moving up and down them on different instruments
• Encourage the use of various levels of energy (dynamics) and timing in movement, speech, and gesture
o Making them talk loud and soft in different parts of the story

2.A locomotor skill is when the child is apply to move from place to another. Where as a nonlocomotor skill is when the child moves their body in a stationary position.

3.In the textbook, it talks about the four different stages in children’s developing body awareness. They are movement as an expression of problem solving, movement as an expression of imagery, movement with no external beat, and movement to a beat with a sense of timing.

4.Some of the different musical concepts that can be taught to the children are beat/meter, fast, slow, getting faster, getting slower, accents, dynamics, rhythmic patterns, and melodic contour.

5.One of the things that they talk about in the textbook is the musical concept of dynamics. This is very important in all types of music otherwise the piece that was being preformed would lose the children’s attention. One of the lesson plans that is used in the book talks but using the song “Frosty the Snowman”. Making sure that while the song is playing point out that it gets softer when they are talking about the part when the snowman is melting. Another thing is have the students draw a big circle and a small circle, then whenever the music is loud have them hold up the big circle and whenever the music is soft have them hold up the little circle that they have made.