A rest is an absence of musical sound, or simply put, “Shh.”
Having children “play the rest” is a really great way to keep on practicing their sense of the beat.
In "C & Shh", we...
-Learn that a silent beat is called a rest
-Learn that music is made up of musical notes & rests
-Learn that "shh" is how we refer to a musical rest
-Practice resting while playing the C bell
If You Don’t Have an Instrument…
Like last week, the Do hand sign is not featured in this video! That said, it is easy enough to sing and sign along in combination with the rest!
You can also try tapping instead of hand-signing for Do, but there will be plenty of tapping in the first Sweet Beets lesson (coming up) so for now, stick to the Do hand sign!
Follow Up Activities
The best way to expand on rhythm activities like this is to try playing the worksheets with a metronome. This is described inside week and inside the worksheets for this episode. This will effectively practice rhythm AND meaningful play with pitch.
You can also expand this lesson by taking page 28 “off the page.” Learning to take the ideas in these activities “off the page” will give you a lot more mileage out of the program. For instance, you can fill out page 28 for a couple lines of practice patterning, OR you can head over to the resources area and find the PsP Elements download.
There you can download easy to cut out versions of the graphics we use. For this activity you will want at least 2 C’s and 2 Shh’s, maybe as many as 4 or 8 of each.
Then you simply create different patterns using C and Shh, and practice singing, playing and hand-signing. You can also use the hand-sign for Do instead of the C bell, so you’ll have more specific instructions (either play the bell, or hand-sign the Solfege).
I’d encourage you to keep the patterns in groups of 4 and only keep 2 groups per row. In other words, 4 notes, a little space, 4 more notes. Then onto the next line, and repeat.
This isn’t my attempt to stifle a creative child who wants to make a pattern of 5, but rather to encourage a consistent and common meter, i.e. pulse, time signature. While all of these things are different in their ultimate musical sense, at this early on in the process we just want to get your kids playing in time and working on patterns!
Keeping the 8 beats per line consistent is not super important, it’s just a nice bonus if you can get it going. If your kid wants to make a pattern of 7 and redirecting them to a group of 8 isn’t working, that’s okay. They’re still practicing the note C, the idea of rests and creating their own patterns, which is a lot!
What's Next?
In the next lesson, we’re going to practice some more rhythms with Beet and Shh in a fruit and vegetable rhythm song, Sweet Beets.
In this Preschool Prodigies episode, we have our first rhythm lessons with Sweet Beets. We practice playing rhythms with ‘Beet’ and ‘Shh,’ in a similar fashion to the way we played ‘C’ and ‘Shh’ in 1.3. Sweet Beets is a catchy song for teaching rhythm, and a great way to get some instrument free ...
In this Preschool Prodigies music lesson, we add the notes E and G to our practice with the note C. We learn that these three notes make up a chord, and we practice playing these bells together in different patterns.
In “Do Mi Sol Slide,” we...
- Learn that a chord is a group of 3 musical n...
In Chord Watching 1, we practice a chord listening exercise with the C Major chord. As this is our first chord listening exercise, students only have to identify whether they hear a group of musical notes (the C Major chord) or the sound of thunder and lightning (which is a non-musical sound).
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