Rebecca Gideon

Student Teaching Portfolio

Fall 2022

Lesson 2: Creating Rhythms in 6/8 Time

In this second lesson, I added more review to playing rhythms in 6/8 time and

incorporated some composition. This lesson was my favorite to teach because it gave students

creative liberty, while giving them guidelines. I was in the orchestra room and could project

things on a monitor. Before any composing happened, I started the lesson with some rhythm

review. I posted "flaschards" that contained two measures of simple rhythms in 6/8 time. I first

had the students chant the rhythms. If there were some inconsistency, I would have the students

chant a rhythm again to see if they could fix the problem. If they did not get it the second time, I

or sometimes my co-op, who you will hear in the video, will talk about what we hear and how to

fix it. After chanting through the rhythms, I had the students play the rhythms with their bows on

an open string.

After the warm-up, I handed everyone a half sheet of paper and told them they were to be

composers. I had a slide in my lesson plan that showed guidelines of "how to write like a

composer." The students needed to write in the time signature and incorporate bar lines. I walked

through this process in the video and wrote an example composition. My next slide showed

instructions saying, "create two measures of your own rhythmic composition." I gave examples

of rhythms they could use, and allowed rests to be part of their composition. My co-op asked if

the students could use subdivisions into their compositions, which was not part of the lesson

plan, but I said yes. The students then had time to write out rhythms and should be able to play
them. After walking around and looking at students' work, I had to talk about the time signature.

Some students were writing them like fractions, which is not the same. I also asked if anyone

knew the chant syllables for 16th notes. Some said "e," which is in duple meter (1 e & a). I then

had the students chant their rhythms all together and then play their composition on an open

string. After everyone played as an ensemble, I had specific instruments play (cellos and basses,

violas, violins), and then classes (juniors, seniors, freshmen, and sophomores). After everyone

played their piece, I had them write their names and hand them over so I could grade them.