Intro to Reading and Writing Rhythms - Hear Your Creation!

During this class, students will learn how to read music notation for rhythms including whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, and eighth notes. This is a great way to explore music, enrich your fine arts studies, and get a some math in, too! We will learn about time signatures and how these determine what completes a measure in music. As students are learning what each type of note (whole, half, quarter, and eighth) looks like and the value (or length) they have, we will practice reading these rhythms by clapping them. Students will also get to do a little "music math" - adding up the values of notes to see if the measure is complete, and figuring out what type of note would complete the measure. 

This class is designed for students with no prior experience reading music, and we will just be focusing on how to read simple rhythms in standard music notation. This class does not cover how to read pitch (note names like "A" and "C sharp"), but I plan to offer another class to teach this aspect of reading music very soon! In my 20+ years as a music teacher, I have found that learning to read rhythms first is a fantastic way to introduce reading music notation and gives students an immediate ability to recognize (and clap!) simple rhythms when they look at sheet music, even if they have not learned how to read the other aspects of the music yet.

I have designed this class to allow students to participate and interact frequently, and this class is best experienced when students are able to have their camera on during the times that we practice clapping the different written rhythms together. We will also use the annotate feature in Zoom to create our own rhythms. (If your device does not have the annotate feature in Zoom, this is still okay, as students can make suggestions that I can add to the screen.)  And at the end of class, I will take some of the rhythms we create during class, and play them for you on my violin!