Meter Exploration

Lesson #10: Name that Meter

Today was my last lesson with my Spanish Oaks Elementary third graders! For our last lesson, I decided to use a lesson plan from one of my professors at BYU (Rob Dunn). He taught this lesson to our class and I loved it! I was very curious how this lesson would go with non-college music majors. So I taught it to this wonderful class and learned a lot! 

First, each student received a tennis ball (after going over the rules for the tennis balls). Then I directed the students to bounce the tennis balls in unison to form a common beat. They discovered this was hard. Simply bouncing the ball and catching it was harder too than I expected! Then we sang "Mary Had a Little Lamb" and bounces the ball to the beat. This was much easier--because there was a beat to follow that we were all listening to.

I demonstrated bouncing the ball on the floor (beat 1) and then catching it (beat 2). I drew visuals on my whiteboard that looked like this.

12       12       12       12

The students recited this with me and bounced their tennis balls in a 2 pattern.
This later turned into strong/weaks--like so:

Sw       Sw      Sw     Sw


This is an example of meter. Meter can be defined as: the regular groupings of strong and weak beats. The meter that has groupings of 2 is called duple meter.

We also learned triple meter! Instead of just the down-catch, down-catch pattern students now do down-catch-catch, down-catch-catch.

123      123    123    123

Sww     Sww   Sww    Sww

Then we listened to a bunch of different recordings of songs and bounced the tennis balls with the meter of each song. At the beginning, I told the students which meter it was in and also tapped the beat on my fingers so they could see the beat. Towards the end of the lesson, I tapped the beat but did not immediately tell them which meter the song was in. On average, about 3/4 of the class correctly figured out which songs were in 2 and 3.

If the song was slower, we could stand and bounce the tennis balls. If the song was faster, than it was easier to sit/kneel down and bounce from there.

Here's some of the songs we listened to that will be familiar to most people (if not by title, then by listening):

• Pachebel's Canon in D (2)
• Rossini's William Tell Overture (2)
• Copland's Variations on a Shaker Hymn (2)
• Copland's Rodeo: Hoe Down (2)
• Ravel's Bolero (3)
• Tchaikovsky's Waltz of the Flowers (3)
• Star Wars Main Theme (2)
• Pirates of the Caribbean (3)
• Polar Express (2)
• Spider Man (2)
• Lord of the Rings (4)
• We briefly learned compound duple (4). (Down, catch, catch, catch)

This lesson was slightly crazy but fun! The kids were able to listen to a wide variety of music and to improve their listening skills while listening for strong and weak beats.

So Long, Farewell

Teaching in this classroom has been one of my favorite experiences I've had while at BYU. Each of the students also made me their own thank-you cards! They are so sweet. I'm grateful for the opportunity I've had to teach them and for all that they have taught me this semester.