These days almost everything is a learning game. I often find myself thinking “there’s got to be a fun game for me to learn how to do something boring like using Microsoft Excel sheets right?” Music itself is inherently fun. There is endless challenge starting from the simplest nursery rhyme through to complex compositions. You can constantly level up or choose different musical games altogether by going from European art music to Jazz or Indian classical music.
Those of us who teach music can find ourselves in the predicament of keeping the fundamentals fun to learn while attempting to maintain novelty with our students. The fundamentals of our craft require repetition which can become a grind. The books I share below offer structure to keep students learning but use games to enliven the repetition. Whether you are a music teacher, homeschool parent or even a game designer working on creating music games, these books offer a lot of ideas for how you can playfully develop fundamental musical skills.
John Feierabend’s Conversational Solfege
Solfege are the note names given to notes of the scale. If you’ve ever watched the Sound of Music you’ll know the famous song “Do, a deer, a female deer…” These syllables provide a name for notes. There are also rhythm syllables used to name rhythms.
Feierabend’s curriculum is based around 12 stages of learning to hear, rote learn, decode (or translate) and write music. Each stage represents leveling up. Once enough aptitude is demonstrated in a stage they level up to the next stage. Aptitude is shown by solo singing, decoding music by translating notes or rhythms into syllables or reading, writing or creating music.
The game-based learning happens within the well-designed activities. Many curriculums tell you “what” to teach without ideas for “how” to teach it. The activities included in the Feierabend curriculum balance repetition and novelty. Rather than having students simply echo a sheet of melodic or rhythmic patterns every class games are used to keep it fresh. For example, one pattern may become “poison.” If a student echoes it they are “caught out.” It gives a chance to catch when someone isn’t focused.
There are a long list of games for each stage of learning in Conversational Solfege. It is a curriculum that is being adopted by many school districts in the US and growing in popularity internationally. Its use of games to alleviate the grind of repetition makes it a great choice for keeping the play alive in learning.
Rhythm and Movement: Applications of Dalcroze Eurythmics
This book by Elsa Findlay offers a lot of fun ideas. Eurythmics isn’t just a band from the 80s with Annie Lennox. It is also the music pedagogy that was first created by Jacques Dalcroze from Switzerland in the 1800s. It is a form of music education that involves a lot of movement and features fun learning games. Elsa Findlay’s book is divided into sections to address each element of music such as beat, tempo, meter, pitch, melody and more with game ideas for each. For example, when teaching Meter and accents the teacher beats the drum and whenever the students hear an accent, a louder beat of the drum, they are touch the ground with their hands. The teacher can do random accents slowly leading to providing a sense of meter, groupings of accents into groups of 2s, 3s or combinations of those numbers.
The book is a fun reference for anyone looking for ideas to explore important musical concepts through game like activities. It is cheap and also available on kindle however there isn’t any media to help you understand exactly what is to be done. You can search on YouTube where you’ll probably find people speaking in French with kids all dressed in black leotards skipping around a room. Despite this I have tried many of the activities in this book with success.
Movement and Music
Meaningful Movement: A Music Teacher’s Guide to Dalcroze Eurythmics
This is a great reference book for music learning games by David Frego and Marla Burke. It is yet another Dalcroze based book, I guess he was a fun guy. I include it here because it is a great alternative to the book above. It provides you links and a password to see videoe examples of the activities described but the price difference is considerable.
The organization of this book is fantastic. There is an index of activities arranged by musical concept with over 100 activities arranged in a sequence of easy to difficult. There are fun games such Hip and Hop which has your students double or half the beat depending on whether you say hip or hop, teaching them to subdivide the beat.
A game they’ve name ‘High and Low’ has them click their fingers if they hear the tones go from low to high or clap when they hear the tones go from high to low, all while walking to the beat of the music. The physical response to music helps students to move who are stuck at desks all day while being a fun way to “answer” musical questions. This book has been incredibly useful for addressing focus and rhythm timing issues that some of my students have struggled with. I highly recommend it. There is not a class that I teach that does not involve at least one of their techniques.
0 Comments