Over the last few weeks I’ve been looking at all sorts of different and easy music manipulatives for introducing basic notation and new musical concepts. These are a great way to bring the subject to life and really engage young beginners.
- Mc Graw Hill Manipulatives There are a variety of manipulatives for Pre-K to grade 8. These are very simple to use on the whiteboards. Use the sidebar menu on the left to chose the grade, then work-mats from the backgrounds, and the manipulatives you need for your lesson.
- Sol-fa mittens I use these sol-fa mittens to practice melodic decoding.I sing a 4 beat melody and students echo while showing the melody by tapping the sol-fa mittens. Students then flip the mitten of the last pitch sung, so that the thumb is facing the other way.
I found these funMusic Fortune Tellers from Just A little More on Pinterest – What a great idea! Check out the post for a free template to make your own music fortune tellers – A fun way to review musical concepts which goes down very well!
Music is an area of special interest for many people with autism, and music therapy is a popular intervention for children and adults with autism. Strangely though, very few music instructors have any training or experience in working with people on the autism spectrum. Another word for manipulative. Find more ways to say manipulative, along with related words, antonyms and example phrases at Thesaurus.com, the world's most trusted free thesaurus.
Another clever idea came from the Mrs King’s Music Class blogwhich is a fantastic source of ideas and inspiration for music teachers. Mrs King uses super cheap, plastic file wallets and dry erase marker pens, to practice music notation listening and writing kills. It’s a perfect resource for beginners – quick and easy to rub out any mistakes and ready to re-use over and over again. Check out the post,I bet these lap packs come in handy all the time!
If you want something similar but on a bigger scale for teaching the whole class, this Dry Erase Music Staff poster and Music Note & Symbol set is a great visual and manipulative teaching aid.
DIY Magnetic Music Notes
This DIY Magnet Music Notes activity is so easy and cheap to make, and in these days of digital overload it has a refreshingly retro appeal! You can find the full post with the Free Printable Notes Sheet here.
Lego Beats Music Manipulatives
Lego makes a brilliant music manipulative – teachers often use it to for maths lessons and so it’s also an excellent way to teach rhythm and notation. Check out the full post for how the FREE PRINTABLE LEGO BEATS SHEET to use these lego beats for a fun way to explain how notation works that is both visual and physical.
Note Naming With Trains Music Manipulatives
Trains are always a firm favourite, and playing this music note naming with trains activity is a fun way to help them practice the order of the do- re-mi colours and the notes on the stave. It’s a fun up-cycled craft activity too where each child can make their own coloured train and then find where it belongs on the stave. If you don’t have time to make the trains like this, there’s a handy free printable trains sheet provided in the post, just click on the link above.
If you’ve enjoyed this post, check out our new How To Read Music Theory Bundle? It’s full of fun & child friendly ways to learn to read music!
Get musical inspiration into your inbox!
Receive updates from Let's Play Music straight into your inbox!
As you may have guessed, Flocab is a HUGE advocate for incorporating music into the classroom. It has been known to increase student engagement which, in turn, increases knowledge retention and student mastery.
Need some creative ways to include music as a part of your instruction? We’ve compiled some popular and effective practices to get your students’ heads bobbing while they learn!
Okay, we can’t guarantee you’ll go viral like fourth grade teacher Dwayne Reed, but we can guarantee your students will be excited about the subject area early on, as they should be. Similarly, dismissing students with this approach will reinforce newly acquired knowledge and keep them hungry for more!
Need some inspiration? Check out his welcome video below:
Manipulativesthe Kodá Ly Aspiring Music Classroom App
2. Create a song or playlist to demonstrate mastery
Similarly, students can demonstrate understanding by writing their own song about a content area or concept. Flocabulary’s new Lyric Lab is a great resource that will help you execute this practice seamlessly!
New to Lyric Lab? Here’s an overview:
Creating a playlist is also a great way for teachers to gauge how well students mastered a particular subject area. As TeachHub describes, “If they play happy music during a tragic period in history, they need to review the content again.”
Many of us are familiar with the classic Mary Poppins song, “A Spoonful of Sugar (Helps the Medicine Go Down).” Using music for the purpose of transitioning between activities, subjects or tasks is practically perfect in every way! As Responsive Classroom describes:
Music smoothes transitions and soothes tempers, especially in the early elementary grades. There is a long tradition of early childhood educators using songs to support transitions and clean-up times. Whether you’re cleaning up or lining up, it’s easier with a song!”
We couldn’t agree more!
Speaking of soothing tempers, music is a resourceful way to manage your students’ energy levels. Want them to shake off that excess energy? Play an upbeat, active tune for the first five minutes of class. Alternatively, calming them down with a relaxing melody is also an option. Scholastic agrees!
Using music as writing prompts is an especially popular method for ELA instructors. Teacher and Edutopia blogger, Heather Wolpert-Gawron, writes
Picture this. The students enter the classroom. John Williams is playing on the speakers. Maybe it’s the ominous opening from the film Jaws or the flying sequence from Hook. Now write.”
Sounds like an exciting start to class, right?
In addition, a study from John Hopkins School of Education says that playing reflective music while writing holds students’ attention for longer periods of time than without, and was proven when students wrote twice as much with music.
Rewriting lyrics to a popular song is yet another creative outlet for your students while they engage in writing. Edublogs shares an example, and we have one of our own! Did we mention Lyric Lab?
Rap it. Chant it. Master it. This technique has been showcased in a multitude education blogs, articles and sites. We couldn’t be more excited to see the power of music and vocabulary acknowledged and practiced in classrooms all over the world.
Music is a universal learning tool which is why it’s also used to teach second languages. Don’t limit the learning to your native tongue! As Middlebury Interactive shares,“Through learning lyrics, students’ vocabulary can quickly become more advanced, and singing phrases can lead to better vocabulary recall. Songs can also prove helpful in learning paralinguistic and extralinguistic elements, including accents and tones, helping to improve pronunciation and comprehension of the language.”
Flocabulary is Effective Vocabulary Instruction
Manipulativesthe Kodá Ly Aspiring Music Classrooms
Our award-winning WordUp! program is proven to boost reading scores.
Manipulativesthe Kodá Ly Aspiring Music Classroom Lesson
To segway into our final suggestion, setting up your class to discuss lyrics and interpret the meaning of songs, especially when teaching a second language, is key when it comes to gaining a greater understanding of a particular culture. FluentU elaborates on the importance of this practice: “Communication is as much about language as it is about culture. Often times, miscommunication occurs not because of the words said, but because of cultural assumptions by the parties on all sides that conflict or are not understood. Music stands as the one nearly universal cultural expression. Every culture through history has had music in some form or another.”
Manipulativesthe Kodá Ly Aspiring Music Classroom Rules
So there’s the “rhyme and reason” behind incorporating music into your instruction. See what we did there? Have your own, unique way of using music in the classroom? Share it with us via Twitter!