5 Fun Rhythm Games for Musical Learning at Home
In this episode, the host provides five interactive rhythm games that listeners can play at home to improve their rhythm, which is a fundamental part of music. The games are designed for both kids and adults and incorporate various techniques such as assigning words to different rhythm patterns to make them easier to understand and remember. The host also emphasizes that rhythm can be learned, even if it initially seems difficult. Specific games include 'Clap Alongs' on YouTube, a zoo-themed game, body percussion, 'Don't Clap This One Back', and a rhythm pyramid for those playing an instrument. At the end of the episode, the host encourages listeners to reach out with any queries or feedback via their social media platforms.
00:00 Introduction
00:19 Understanding Rhythm
01:17 Interactive Clap Along Game
03:57 Zoo Rhythm Game
05:06 Body Percussion Game
06:18 Don't Clap This One Back Game
06:56 Rhythm Pyramid Game
10:11 Conclusion and Contact Information
10:29 Podcast Outro
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Good morning, everyone hope you all. Well. Hopefully quite a quick little episode today. I want to give you five rhythm games that you can play at home with your children, or even if you're an adult or a teenager learning, you can play them as well.
Some are for everyone to play. And the one at the end, the bonus one is mostly for people who play an instrument.
So rhythm tells us when to play something can music. It doesn't tell us what to play. It doesn't tell us how to play it. But it does tell us when to play it. That's an important distinction to make. Some people are kind of born with natural rhythm, you know, you kind of see, especially in drum lessons, Some people in the first lesson just really confined the B and con you know, drum along with things quite easily. Whereas other people, including myself as a child can really struggle to even find a beat or even clap in time with music. The good news is that. Even if you find this really hard right now, it is something that can be learned.
And I know that cause I was the world's worst at first. And now I can obviously play in time and things like that. And the other thing is even if people are born with kind of good natural rhythm, No one is born being able to complete complex rhythms. That's something we all have to learn. So it's something we all need to work on. So this will be beneficial for everyone.
Okay. The first thing that I want to tell you about a fun little game it's interactive. It's basically on YouTube, you can type in clap along the videos. anD what it does is it shows you rhythms that you can see. And it clicks along with it and you basically have to clap some, some are ones where you hear at first and clap it back. Other ones, you just looking at it and you're clapping in real time.
Now the way to tackle these. Is that we want rhythms to kind of become like sentences. Let me explain. Different rhythms. You can assign different words to, for example, To quavers I might say is the word rabbit. Or Fanta or whatever word you want to use. For semiquavers attached to each other. I might say as the word caterpillar or Coca Cola.
So it's something with four syllable. So we're using the syllables of words. In order to identify different rhythms so I can look at rhythm. And I can just, just by looking at it, I can quickly go. That's a caterpillar, that's a dragon, that's a cow. And that's a rest, for example. If you think about how we read words in English. First children learn phonics and they read every single letter and every single sound to put together. At. Cats. And then they learn to read cath.
Whereas now we just look at a word. We might look at the first letter. The last letter and roughly well letters in the middle and our brain knows what that word is. You know, think about like believe or something you don't just look at. Every single letter, you just look at the big a there's a few eyes and these nails, not sure the order weather. And your brain just kind of processes it and that's fine.
And you know what that word is. So we want rhythms to be the same kind of thing, rather than counting. Oh, that's one E and a two and three. For. You know, that's kind of gets confusing and it's incoherent and it's not, it's not smooth and doesn't sound musical. Whereas if I can look at it and go, oh yeah, caterpillar. Rabbit dog. Dragon or whatever, you know?
I can kind of coherently play those rhythms. So that's what these videos are for anyway. So recommend assigning some rhythms. They can be drinks. You could have. Coke or Fanta. Lemonade Coca-Cola whatever. Or animals, you know, we could, I've done this recently in assembly, got a hundred kids playing along with these clap alongs. And they audit it successfully by using animals.
So we had cow. Rabbit then we had dragon fly. And we had caterpillar.
And then when it was arrest for one beat, we just did a. Why that. so That can be really good fun. And I'll put some links to that in the show description as well. But if you just type in rhythm, clap alongs on YouTube, you'll find them.
Okay. The next game kind of leads on from that. And it's one which practices rhythm and coordination to play with young children.
So basically you want to tap your legs. You know, or you could clap I suppose, but tap your legs and we're going to start off by just tapping one. Crotchy beat. If you like. So we go in, if you're gonna hear this. Like that. And then what you say over the top is. So we're talking about going to the zoo and you're saying, for example, I went to see a dragon and then the next time you said that sentence, you're clapping the rhythm of dragons.
And now you go in.
I went to see. Ben and you climb in bear.
Yeah. I went to see. A polar bear.
Et cetera. And you carry on like that. So basically you want to choose animals that have different amounts of syllables. So ones with one syllable or the easiest two syllables, fairly easy. Four syllables is fairly easy. Three syllables is a bit trickier. But that's something you can. You know, definitely work towards and build up to.
Third really cool game is body percussion.
So basically this is the idea that you listen to music. You find the beat and then you assign actions to the beat. So you could stamp your feet. You could tap your legs, hit your chest, clap your hands. You know, kind of third-year chest, there's all different things you can do. Click your fingers.
And what you want to do is you can start off simple and just go, okay, we're going to do four stumps and then four claps and four clicks along with the music. But eventually you can kind of mix and match and create your own patterns. And children find this quite interesting. They can even write it down to help them. You know, okay.
In the verse, we're going to do click clap, stomp clap, or whatever it may be. And again, you can make that a bit more complicated by rather than just having one action per beat. You could have two. So you're using kind of rabbit rhythms, also known as quavers. There are also examples of this on YouTube, which is almost like a dance along video in a way. So they might have a famous song. And then in time with the music, it shows you which actions to do, and you just stick the video on and the children can kind of do that along with it. So you can either create your own. Or you can watch a pre-existing one it's really popular amongst kind of primary school, age children, particularly kind of key stage one.
And then like the lower part of key stage two.
Another really quick. One is don't clap this one back. This is a really famous game that a lot of teachers play with their class just for a few minutes. So you assign a rhythm. And if you hear this rhythm, do you must not clap it back? And if you do clap it back, you're out. So normally it's something like don't clap. This one. So you could go, okay, we're going to do this with them. Then they clap back. Okay.
What about this one?
Then they clap it back down. Duh, duh, duh. But then if you go.
That's the don't clap this one back. Then we hope to hear silence. If anyone claps that out. So that's another quick game. But now for the bonus game, this is quite a good one for anyone who's planning an instrument, and we want to think about a rhythm pyramid. So if you mentioned like the food permits, they used to teach us, but before anyone knew anything about nutrients I'm showing.
I feel old saying that anyway. If you think of a pyramid. So at the bottom. You have the smallest rhythm. So let's go for example. Semiquavers so that is four notes per beat. Above that you could have. Quavers that's two notes per beat. And above that you could have crutches, which is one note per beat.
Obviously you can change that, make it more complicated. If you want to add triplets or some mixture between semiquavers and quavers to kind of create some more complex rhythms, that's up to you. The idea is though you put in. Put a metronome on. And then with your instrument, you play those rhythms.
So whilst it's click in at first, you're playing, you could just play one note or you could play a scale. And you go in 1, 2, 3, 4 1, 2, 3, 4 1. It did. this is semiquavers so you could be thinking Coca Cola, Coca Cola, caterpillar, caterpillar, or one egg and a two week. Gender. You do that for a bar? And then without stopping and you transition into quavers and they go in one and two and drag and drag. Rabbit, rabbit, whatever word you choose, then you go into quavers cow. Cows is just one. Two. Three. For, and the idea is you go through that pyramid. All the way up to the top. All the way back down again without stopping. I'm going to quickly grab my guitar, actually.
And I'll just quickly show you this.
Right. We're back. So I've got my guitar with me. I'm just going to show you that rhythm pyramid. So I'm going to put a metronome on which you should be able to hear. I'm going to put it on at, let's say 90 beats per minute. So this is clicking. 90 times every minute. And this has given me my tempo. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to play just one note, just for example. Okay. And what I'm going to do is at first play with semiquavers then quavers then crunch it back to quavers back to semiquavers 34.
Quavers.
Crotch it
quavers.
Semiquavers.
Okay. And you can do it rather than just one note. You could try and do part of a scale.
For example.
Okay. So I went on a little bit longer than intended there. I was hoping this would be a kind of five minute episode, but here we are 12 minutes in or something, but. Hopefully I've given you five ideas there for little games you could play, whether it be on an instrument or just kind of around the home, depends on the age of your child. Or if you yourself are learning, you could choose maybe a couple of those more complex or more mature kind of games. The clap along video is a great. The last rhythm pyramid that I showed you, that would be for their slightly more advanced. And obviously for younger children, we've got the zoo game where we went to the zoo and we saw a caterpillar, caterpillar, caterpillar, caterpillar. And we've got the body percussion, which is quite fun.
And don't clap this one back, which is probably for younger children as well. Okay. Hope that's helpful guys. As always any questions, please send them in on Instagram at group. Offline music education, you can connect with me on LinkedIn. You can check us out on Facebook, on the website, send us emails any way you want to contact us. That'll be awesome.
Thank you for listening and see you next week.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Heard It Through The Groove Line, the podcast that helps parents like you best support your children's musical education, even if you are not musical yourself. To find out more you can follow us on social media and don't forget to hit like and subscribe.