Miss White Ideograph

Hey everyone! I hope you are having so much fun making plans and getting ready for Halloween tomorrow! I wanted to get this up ASAP in case you needed a fun little Halloween rhythm work! Today I’m sharing an ideograph for our folk song of the week, Miss White Had a Fright (Get the free song card here!).

Ideographs are a wonderful tool to help students track the song as it is happening. This teaches our young friends that music can be written down, we can represent our musical ideas on the page, we can track the steady feeling in a song, and we can make meaning from the written versions of songs we know. I usually just share ideographs with the icons, but today I wanted to share a second version in case some of your friends are ready for a challenge. In the school were I taught this second version would be appropriate for probably first, second, and third graders, who have already learned about quarter notes and eighth notes, and have had a lot of practice reading and writing them!

In the second version there are still pictures, but underneath the pictures there are rhythm dots (notice that they are not written out as notes!). These dots are lined up with the pictures so that the ideograph still shows the sequencing of the song in both icons and dots, and students can use the pictures as clues when trying to find the part of the song they’re working on. The students can follow along with the rhythm dots under the pictures. This is another step towards building their understanding of written music.

And if your students are really wanting a challenge, they could try to turn the rhythm dots into the rhythms with stems and beams, as appropriate. This takes some time, and I would only attempt if your students already know quarter notes and eighth notes and have had practice writing and reading them in other songs. They can tap through the rhythm they’ve filled out to make sure it fits the song, and then take it home to show their families they can write the rhythm to songs they know! It really is so exciting.

I hope you have fun with this ideograph, and I wish you all a happy and safe Halloween!

Click here to download the ideographs

Happy singing! -Lauren