This week’s folk song is No Robbers Out Today–make sure you’ve downloaded the free song card.This song is great for working on early music literacy skills. There’s a lot to work on here–the [m sl] tone set, the form, and the rhythm are all great for our early readers. Today’s activity focuses on rhythm work. The quarter note/eighth note patterns are perfect for decoding practice. I wanted to frame this rhythm activity first as an ideograph, to remind our little friends that we read music just like we read a book–left to right, and top to bottom. The ideograph also shows them that we can track/follow along to a song we know, and that we can make musical meaning from the written page.
Honestly, for our littlest music friends, this is enough work. Mastering the language, and then working through the coordination of matching up what they are singing to what they see and trace along with on the page is a lot of important, foundational work.
For our emerging music readers, I have placed dots under each of the images on the ideograph. Keen eyes will quickly notice that the dots refer to the rhythm of this song. Song dotting is something I learned in my Songworks training and I think it is a great transitional skill for kids that are ready for a bit more of a challenge. I might have my kindergartners/early first graders working through this process. Realizing that one sound we make is encoded within one dot on the page is powerful, and sets us up for more traditional rhythm work. They can track the dots as they sing, and feel proud knowing they are reading a type of written music. Incredible!
After quarter notes and paired eighth notes have been made conscious (this is a Kodaly term meaning they have experienced and labeled the “new skills” of reading/writing eighth notes), this song becomes a great practice for dictation. After going through the ideograph and the song dotting, see if they can turn the dots into traditional rhythm notation. Can they add stems and beams to the note heads and read a true rhythmic pattern? This is an activity that can be done as a whole class on a whiteboard/smart board, as a small group, or individually.
It is incredible to me what one little song can offer in terms of depth of study. Look at all we can extract within this one song–and this is just rhythm work! Our folk standards offer such complexity within something that at first glace seems so simple.
I hope this is helpful for you and if you enjoyed this ideograph, I have a growing collection of ideographs farther back in my free resources section. Such a powerful tool in the music classroom!
Happy Singing!
-Lauren