Monday, August 26, 2013

Note Values and Fractions Display

As a new teacher I am getting my room ready to go from scratch. There is nothing in there, so I get to start out fresh!

I really want to help the students understand how fractions and music note values are related. In preparation for that lesson to come, I created one of these for each value of note that we use in class, whole, half, quarter, and eighth. It has the name of the note, a picture of the note on a five line staff, a graphic representation of a measure, and a short definition.

Notice that I did not include the number of beats each note gets. I think children get confused about how music note value relates to fractions when we get to an eighth note is 1/8 of a measure and 1/2 of a beat. My idea is to start with the first fraction, an eighth note is 1/8 of a measure and it would take 8 eighth notes to fill up a full measure. From there we can start dissecting the beat. 

I thought about the graph at length and am still not entirely satisfied with it. On each page the section that is colored in darker is one of that note. I decided to use a rectangle because measures are rectangular. 

I will probably tweak this around as I go, or I might scrap it all together. We'll see how it goes!

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