BLOG | kodalycrafts

Jun 20, 2019
2 min

The Lion Sleeps Tonight: A Scarf Dance

In one of my previous posts about neuropsychology, I mentioned attending a workshop with the wonderful Robyn Stavely in which she demonstrated the power of teaching through non-verbal gesture by teaching us a whole dance without speaking a word. The dance involved the use of dancing scarves , which were manipulated in a variety of ways to show phrasing, dynamic variation, form and beat and was set to this interpretation of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" The actions were as follows

185 views0 comments

Jenny Ferris

Jun 14, 2019
3 min

Rain, Rain, Go Away

Presenting taa & ti-ti as the first rhythmic concepts students will add to their growing vocabulary is an important step, and is a lesson I always look forward to giving. In order to present taa & ti-ti to your students, they need to have a couple of things down-pat first: 1. They must be able to perform a number of folk songs which contain these rhythms and they must be able to do them accurately without the help of a teacher. 2. They have to be able to keep the beat in

47 views0 comments

Jenny Ferris

Jun 1, 2018
2 min

Pool noodle rhythm manipulatives

Rhythmic dictation can sometimes feel like a necessary evil in the music curriculum. Students can feel under pressure in test-like conditions, there is a need for silence in order to complete the activity, it can feel at times like the un-fun but necessary part of music education. Well, it doesn't have to be like this. Rhythmic dictation has become one of my favourite things to teach once I made one simple discovery: there are more ways to write down a rhythm than just using

74 views0 comments

Jenny Ferris

Dec 31, 2017
2 min

Rhythm Dictation Wallets

As the school year has wrapped up and the craziness of report-writing season has died down, I am left thinking about assessment and the constant juggling act we teachers seem to perform between our own needs to assess our students' learning, the needs of our school/district/state system to implement its own assessment guidelines and the needs of our students to be engaged and enjoy their music lessons. As such, I am always on the lookout for assessment tasks that double as a

120 views0 comments