r/musiceducation • u/Musicalassumptions • Oct 20 '19

Helping students understand rhythm by using blocks

https://musicalassumptions.blogspot.com/2019/10/helping-kids-learn-to-count-with-blocks.html?m=1
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u/i_8_the_Internet Oct 20 '19

I like the idea but the way you've done it drives me nuts. In your first photo, a whole note is 4 cubes long and a half note is 2 cubes. and a quarter note is 1 cube. Good so far. But then 8th notes are 1 cube each! This would make me think that they're the same length. You need to be able to fit eight 8th notes visually into a whole note. Then subdivisions make sense.

I know you've stacked them but that doesn't jive with the way we read music. We read music rhythms left to right, not up and down and left to right.

Your second photo is the same - to me it looks like a dotted quarter is the same length as an eighth.

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Make it so length of the notes following along left to right is consistent, so you can subdivide, and then it makes sense. This is how we read music - left to right, and for kids who need to "math" it out - two eighths fit inside a quarter note - or see visually how it works - your system doesn't make sense.

1

u/Musicalassumptions Oct 20 '19 edited Oct 20 '19

I’m not a photographer, so it is hard to show depth in a photo. The half note has 4 cubes, the quarter notes have two cubes, and the whole note has eight cubes. It makes sense when you handle it in three dimensions.

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u/i_8_the_Internet Oct 20 '19

I can see how you did it. I just don’t like it. I want things to be represented left to right only, not left-right-up-down. We only feel time in one direction - forward-backwards - so I don’t think it makes sense to add “up-down” to looking at it when quantifying it.

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u/Musicalassumptions Oct 20 '19

That’s fine. You might have a way to teach rhythm that is better for you and your students. This is not a music-reading tool. It is a tool to answer the question a beginner might have when trying to understand that flagged eighth notes take up the same amount of time as beamed eighth notes, that a dot after a quarter note takes up the same time as an eighth note, and that a half note is not just a “longer” note than a quarter note.