Pinterest in the Classroom

Ok, so I am about to post about some ways that Pinterest can be used in the classroom. It's a little harder for music teachers, but if you get creative, there are actually some pretty cool possibilities. Probably the most popular way of using Pinterest in the classroom is for creating lesson plans. In this way, Pinterest is useful for keeping all of your hair-brained ideas in one spot so that you can easily flip back and forth between them. This is exactly how I used it in my lesson called "Picture Rhythms". You can click on the link to follow to my actual lesson plan. A basic overview of this project however is just another way of getting young children to read rhythms without them knowing it. The thing about music is that it is difficult if you stop to think about it, but if you do what comes naturally, it's actually pretty easy. The key to teaching music to children relies on this idea that it come naturally for most people. 

So for this project, I started with a subject. Mine happened to be fruit. After I chose a topic, I picked words that had one, two, three, and four syllables. The reason for this is that these words will later come to represent quarter notes, eighth notes, quarter note triplets, and sixteenth notes. For those of you who know nothing about music, a single quarter note can be divided into two eighth notes, three quarter note triplets, or four sixteenth notes. So after I chose the fruits I wanted to use, I went and printed off pictures of them and cut them out.





Next, I used prior knowledge to assign these fruit rhythms according to the syllables in their name. For example, Pear only has one syllable, so a Pear would be represented by one quarter note. On the other hand, Watermelon has four syllables, so Watermelon would be represented by four sixteenth notes. In order to make this all less complicated for children, I probably wouldn't even ask them to think about the names of the notes. It's a lot easier to understand if you think about it like this:

1 syllable =  

2 syllables = 

3 syllables = 

4 syllables = 



I'm sorry that the clip art doesn't all correspond and look fancy, but it was free. Anyways, the next step was to get some construction paper, and glue the pictures of the fruit near the top of the paper (Landscape). Altogether this took four sheets of paper, but in the project it would only be two per student. The students don't know it, but they are each composing one 4/4 measure of music.




Next, I wrote down the rhythms that corresponded with the syllables of each fruit.



After I finished writing down the rhythms for each fruit, I wrote down the names of the fruits underneath their rhythm. This last step if more for the other children to understand than the children actually doing the project.



So of course, for me, that was the last step, but if you were using this in the classroom you would want the children to stand in front of the class holding these bad boys, and you would have them read or "perform" them for the whole class. Of course, if I was teaching this lesson, I would probably ask the children to join me in laying down some mad beats for our performers to jam along with... but that's just me. :-)