This is an ideal lesson to use when teaching a Weather Unit to your students. Find the lesson plan below!
“LET IT RAIN”
MATERIALS NEEDED: You and your students PREP TIME: 0
DURATION OF LESSON: 25 -30 minutes
VOCABULARY: Percussion, Sound Effects, Rhythm Pattern, Tapping, Clapping
Introductory Activity: Teach the song “Rain, Rain Go Away” with students.
Practice having students first watch and then try and imitate using a steady beat by either clapping or tapping their legs.
SITTING ACTIVITY: 10 minutes (Rhythm Integration w/Language and Math Acquisition) Integrated Music and Games
MAKING RAIN and following directions without verbal cues.
· Ask students first to stand in a circle shoulder-to-shoulder. You will be standing inside the circle.
· To demonstrate your directions, ask the students to model or copy your action or sound as you perform them, otherwise known as “do-as-I-do.” Students are not to start the action/sound until you have walked directly in front of them.
· Select one student to begin, use eye contact as you start a motion such as tapping the top of your head lightly. This signals the student to begin. When that student copies your motion walk to the next student, then the next student, and so on. (Some students will usually start immediately so I am careful to re-iterate that they are not to begin the motion or sound until I am directly in front of them.)
· After walking around the circle, every student should be tapping his or her head softly also. At the same place and student where you began, using contact to signal, change the motion by rubbing your stomach making sure they understand they can only change actions when you are right in front of them. (This means that half of the circle at one point will be actively engaged in one motion while the other half does the new motion).
· As all students are now rubbing their stomachs, after you’ve successfully walked around the circle begin to make each of the following the sounds:
ACTIVITY: Perform each of these movements and sounds sequentially as you move around the circle until each student is participating.
1. Rub your hands together as if you’re trying to get them warm and walk around the circle.
2. Take two fingers and tap them against your other two fingers and cluck the tongue intermittently.
3. Tap your hands against your thighs.
4. While still tapping hands on the thighs, stomp your feet by jogging in place.
5. While still tapping your hands and jogging in place, add an intermittent clap of your hands here and there for the effect of thunder.
At this point the rainstorm should be in full effect and as it peaks we will reverse the patterns and wind it down.
6. Continue to move around the circle and first remove the intermittent clapping.
7. Secondly, continue to move around the circle but discontinue the jogging.
8. Thirdly, continue to move around the circle and change to:
9. Students snap and cluck.
10. Students rub hands.
11. After this last motion of rubbing the hands together, blow softly as if almost whistling to imitate the sound of the wind. There should be soft blowing and whistling sounds and when you find an appropriate moment signal everyone to stop by sitting down quietly.
12. OR: After this final pass around the circle please find a space within the circle and at an appropriate moment by example, stop all sound and rest in silence for a moment.
REFLECTION: After answering the following questions, revisit one of the first activities, and new vocabulary
QUESTIONS:
1. What did you hear?
2. What actions made which sounds?
3. Could we have made that sound with just one person? What about a few people?
4. Was it music?
5. Is percussion always a sound-pattern or rhythm?
Ask students to listen to the rain the next time it rains and to hear the different sounds and see if they sound similar to what you just created as a group. Look to the chapters on making shakers and sound effects for similarly related topics.
CONCLUSION AND GOALS:
1. Students understand that through working together we are able to achieve success.
2. Students understand that a weather like rainstorms have patterns.
3. Students understand that “percussion” is anything that shakes, hits, taps or strikes against something.
Follow up: Read a poem about rain. Ask the students to imitate the rain sounds that they used in our rain exercise to “illustrate sound effects.”