If you're looking for a fresh way to practice rhythms - be it through reading, performing or composition - then why not add some fruit into your musical diet? I got this fantastic idea from the wonderful Aileen Miracle at the recent Step Up conference in Brisbane. Students are given a number of artificial fruits and must arrange them to make a four beat pattern. They then speak their fruit pattern and try to work out their pattern is in rhythm names. Try to include a variety

So you've just made conscious taa and ti-ti. Now what? Instead of charging full speed into the next rhythmic discovery, it's important to give your students the chance to put their new knowledge into practice and play around with their newfound rhythmic friend. It's also important for you as a teacher to be able to assess that they have in fact fully understood this new concept. There are 6 broad forms that this practice may take: Performing, Reading, Writing, Composing, Impr

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

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