Every day we hear steady beats; the ticking of a clock, the ringing of a telephone, the pedestrian crossing signal, the sound of walking and running feet.
As adults we absorb everyday sounds into our subconscious and rarely give them a second thought, using live, recorded or broadcasted music to satisfy our inbuilt need for rhythm. For young children, a deliberately nurtured awareness of the many sounds around us can provide a starting point for a lifetime appreciation of rhythm. For children with special needs this is a special gift, requiring no academic mastery and accessible to those with disabilities.
A sense of rhythm encouraged through regular participation in activities such as those shown below will aid the development of listening and motor skills, enhance concentration and reinforce basic number skills. It will enable children to experience a sense of calmness, satisfaction and relaxation, far removed from the pressure of producing a ‘right’ answer.
The activities have been devised for non-specialists and can easily be adapted for use with individual children as well as groups.
Beat Walk
Tell the children that they are going to go for a walk around the school, garden, street, supermarket or playground as appropriate. Discuss the sounds they might hear and then explain that today they are going to be listening out for a special kind of sound. You want them to spot regular or repeating sounds.
You will need to explain what you mean by this. Demonstrate by marching on the spot. Ask the children to clap or stamp as you do this to create a sense of continuation. As you march, count out loud, “one, two, one, two”, stressing the “one” and encouraging the children to join in.
Ask if anyone can suggest sounds of this type that they might hear. If their suggestions are inappropriate, demonstrate more repeating sounds and put forward some ideas of your own.
Go for your walk. As you move around the chosen environment be alert to regular sounds and point them out to the children. A playground might provide a swing that squeaks every time it rises, a seesaw that bangs each time it bumps or the sound of a skipping rope hitting the ground as it is turned. A walk down a street might give you a ‘green man’ bleeping, a pneumatic drill juddering, a lorry reversal warning, feet walking on the pavement, a car alarm or a siren. A rural expedition may bring the regular mechanical sounds of farm machinery or the sound of Wellington boots marching through squelchy mud.
On your return discuss the repeating sounds you heard and ask the children to imitate them. Encourage prolonged imitations so that you can clap or stamp to reinforce the idea of “one, two, one, two”. A pictorial display could complete the activity.
Body Beats
Young children love to make funny and interesting sounds with different parts of their bodies. Ask them to explore how many different sounds they can make using their hands or their feet. How many voice or mouth sounds can they make?
Choose one sound, perhaps thigh slapping with alternate hands or both hands together and set up a steady rhythm. If working with a group, check that each child is in time with the others as there is invariably one child who slaps or claps out of time. It may help to count “one, two, one, two” at first.
Now move on to a different body sound without interrupting the flow of the beat. Continue to change sounds, encouraging the children to both watch and listen.
If the group is particularly receptive you might like to try two simultaneous sounds. For example, half of the children could clap to a regular beat while the remainder say “tick, tock, tick, tock” to a high and then a low note.
Disabled children will benefit from listening to others keeping the beat if they are not able to actively participate themselves.
A variation is to keep a steady beat going to a count of “one, two, three, one, two, three”. Practise combinations such as stamp, clap, clap, or slap (thigh), ding, dong (spoken). Thread or draw a row of beads in a red, blue, blue pattern and say the words “red, blue, blue”, or line up some toys and set up a rhythm such as “bus, car, car” or “teddy, doll, doll”, accompanying with stamps, taps or claps to emphasise the regularity of the pulse. Use repeating patterns of the children’s names to produce a rhythm which you can accompany with a steady beat of claps or stamps, “Sammy, Jo, Jo”, “Kate, Millie, Ben”, etc.
Conducting
Sit the children in a large space and play some music with a steady beat. It might be a Mozart symphony, a rock anthem, panpipe music from the Andes, Irish dance music or the Toreador march from Bizet’s Carmen. The possibilities are endless.
As the music plays, show the children how to conduct using sweeping arm movements so that the rhythm is felt in the whole of the upper body. If the music has three beats encourage the children to draw a big triangular shape in the air in time with the beat. They may like to count or clap to the beat and some will enjoy simply listening to the music. Do not be tempted to pressurise children into joining in as they will gain much from listening quietly and absorbing the sounds and rhythms.
Percussion beats
Children enjoy playing musical instruments. For this activity it is advisable to restrict the choice of instrument to those which can be used to produce a steady beat easily, such as tambourines, drums and tambours, chime bars and wood blocks. Use hands or soft beaters for drums so that these instruments do not dominate the activity.
Before you distribute the instruments explain to the children that you want them to listen carefully to the music and use the instruments to join in with the beat. When the music begins show them what to do and ask them to play with you. Use music with a well-marked beat, such as Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King or Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance march. Some children will find it difficult to play in time so you can help by counting the beats aloud with them.
