Submitted by Jennifer Schroeder, Fall River, Wisconsin
Idea posted June 13, 2003
I've been working on the basic concept of chords with my second graders. We've talked about the number of each note in a scale, and we use the song Whacky Birthday (from Music K-8, Vol. 13, No. 1). This is written out in the magazine, but in reality is just a simple chord progression of I IV VI V I. I wrote the chords on a piece of poster board with the notes stacked up over each roman numeral. The students know the rhythm after hearing it a bunch of times, so I simply point to the chords as they happen. The students play the notes on the Boomwhackers® or xylophones.
There's a lot you can do with this: talk about building chords in triads, listen for their different sounds and how the sound of V makes you want to go back to I, et cetera. Using the xylophones works well with this too because they can *see* the triads skipping over notes if you try to play all three notes at once. My kids like to try to play a chord with one hand and 3 mallets.