Whether it's Dollar Tree or Dollarama, I think we can all agree that the dollar store is a great place to find treasures for the Music room! We have found spring and summer to be especially good times to get things. Summer will be coming to an end and it's time we all make sure to pick up these great teaching tools before it's too late!

We love pool noodles! Using a bread knife, we cut pool noodles into pieces to create "beads" with a rhythm drawn in permanant marker on each one. Use string, a bungee, or even a dowel to create rhythm patterns by stringing on the pool noodle pieces. Create longer pool noodle pieces to demonstrate a variety in duration. Use colours to help identify different rhythms if you wish. Here, we have cut blue spacers as our bar lines.

Ribbon wands are excellent movement props. They can be used to demonstrate phrasing, to enhance the visual musicality of a piece, to connect to a mood of a piece, or even as vocal warm-up tool!

Bubbles are a fun way to visually demonstrate when music and/or movement is light as opposed to heavy. Another idea is to identify a reoccurring theme or sound in a piece your class is listening to and every time it presents itself, students pop a bubble!

Chalk can be used to write out rhythms during a dictation exercise. Add even more fun by doing rhythm activities outside! Click HERE to try our outdoor rhythm game Rhythm Squares!

We use these in our Tons of Bugs workshop! Turf squares can be bought at most dollar stores and can be cut into four pieces to use as beats when having students create rhythm patterns. We use the four small pieces to visually demonstrate beat and when a bug is placed on it, the bug word becomes the rhythm. A four beat rhythm pattern is created by each group of students. Super fun! 

The neatest thing happened the other night! Steph was at the Winnipeg Folk Festival Main Stage watching Sheryl Crow and noticed that a large group of children were sitting in a circle playing Beatmaster! Organized all by themselves! To the beat of the music they were listening to! It seriously warmed her heart and she asked the kids if they learned the game from their Music teacher. The children explained that a few of them had, and then taught it to the rest of the group. They loved it and played it for almost the entire set! What a wonderful sight to see. It seriously left Steph warm and fuzzy for the rest of the night.