Category Archives: Physical Visuals

Curwen Hand Signs

Posted on December 7, 2016 | Comments Off on Curwen Hand Signs

In almost every choir classroom, there is a poster of hand signs representing the major scale as created by John Curwen. In my classroom, our hand signs were small, unlabelled, and did not have the chromatics.

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Curwen Handsigns

This example is built on 8 1/2″ x 11″ paper that is backed by different colors: blue is the major scale, green is sharps, and red is flats.

This visual is then used as an aid for sight-reading, understanding solfege relationships, and eventually more challenging music theory concepts. In my advanced women’s group, we used the Curwen hand signs as a visual aid to understand how the scale can be used to build harmony and chords. Then, we were able to talk about progressions and how they relate to solfege.

This is available as a printable, just email me.

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The Rhythm Tree

Posted on December 7, 2016 | Comments Off on The Rhythm Tree

In my elementary classroom, there were some difficulties understanding the relationships between rhythmic values. So! I recreated the idea of the rhythm tree in a colorful visual!

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The Rhythm Tree

This was then used with first through fifth grades to help relate rhythm values. Additionally, all of the rhythms are movable, so different examples can be built and used for different lessons.

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Instrument Cards

Posted on November 2, 2016 | Comments Off on Instrument Cards

This was a fun manipulative for the students! In both my third and fourth grade classes I cut these instruments into individual squares and glued them to construction paper to create cards. Then, I was able to use them in so many ways!

All rights reserved. Please contact me for a printable.

Here were some of the ways I used the instrument cards

  • As a way to sort students into groups
  • Have students find which instrument family their card belonged to
  • Listen for their instrument family and stand during Britten’s “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra”
  • As an individual assessment: students came up at the end of class, picked a card, and sorted it into its corresponding bucket

The students were very successful. The best thing about the cards was students did not have to specific know the name of each instrument. They were able to identify what family they belonged in by how it looks. For the fourth graders who knew what the instrument was, it doubled as a way to check their understanding the names of specific instruments.

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Composing Manipulatives

This was a composing manipulative used with the second graders to practice composing with half notes, or “2 beat ta” as we called it.

All rights reserved. Please contact me for a printable.

In order to give the manipulatives a little more bulk, I glued them to square (1 beat) and rectangular (2 beats) pieces of construction paper that matched the color of the leaves. They also had a large 12×18 piece of construction paper with mapped out beats for them to place their composing cards on.

After they composed in groups, they practiced their composition and then performed it for their peers. The biggest difficulty was getting the classes to come back together because they were having so much fun composing and performing within their own group, they forgot they were going to perform for the rest of the class!

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Posted on November 2, 2016 in Physical Visuals

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