Music Form!

Next week in order to get ready for the Luck of the Irish Limericks the students need to learn about different forms in music.  What is ABA form? ABCA? AABAA? etc.

To do that I've created a PowerPoint that will show the kids how to take patterns, which they can already see thanks to their awesome classroom teachers!!!, and turn them into musical form.

 The first things that the students have to be aware of is that music is in fact made up of patterns! Patterns that repeat and patterns that sound different! Their job is to listen to the music and see if they can hear the patterns.  That comes later though, the first step is to make sure the students can see the difference. Having something tangible to see, at first, is a lot easier to get the point across then starting straight out with listening.

First the students start with something that they already know how to do, spot the pattern! After the pattern is identified they then have to guess what would come next in the pattern!






Then we turn the pattern into what the musical form would be. Whatever the song starts with we call "A" if the rhythm repeats then we say "A" again, when the sound, or rhythm changes then we give it the next letter in the alphabet, or in this case "B" When we hear the same thing we hear at the beginning we go back to that letter "A" So, this pattern, ball, ball, racket, ball, ball, would be A, A, B, A, A!

When looking at this piece of music we want to look at each bar of music (this is a great time to reinforce what bar lines are!!) The first bar of music is always "A" so we know we can give that the letter A. When we look through the rest of the music we have to see if any other bar of music looks the same. When we find the notes that are the same we give it the same letter, A. The first DIFFERENT bar of music we go to the letter B, so on and so forth







Here's what the patterns look like in the song all together. You can get the full 21 slide PowerPoint at my store at Teachers Pay Teachers







After seeing how form is different it's time to hear how form is different.  After the PowerPoint I play different songs, such as Old MacDonald, Here we go LoobyLoo, etc. and whenever the "A" section is on they dance or move one way, and whenever the "B" section goes on they have to move or dance in a different way.

Finally the students then take the song, "Scotland's Burning" and compose their own lyrics to it, with their own movements to show the different movements between A,B,C form.