A few weeks ago one of my customers had the genius idea to use paper reinforcements with my Rhythm Monsters Worksheets. Naturally, I wanted to try and recreate this on my own. So I purchased a few supplies on sale, including what you see below.
I got the color coding labels on sale for $1 (at Krogers of all places) for a 315 count pack. I found the paper reinforcements at the DollarTree. They have 15 sheets totaling 544 reinforcements. I only needed one sheet for each activity. So, depending on your number of students and whether or not you choose to have them partner up, this activity is fairly cheap!
Check out my original Rhythm Monsters blog post
>HERE<. They started out as an idea for rhythm manipulatives and turned into characters for one of my interactive games.
The basic premise of the rhythm monsters is that only certain monsters can speak certain rhythms. Monsters with two eyes can speak with two sounds on a beat, monsters with one eye can speak one sound on a beat, and so on.
I’ll be using the worksheets pictured below for the activities. One worksheet has standard notation, another has stick notation, and the last is left blank for composition activities.
I used the paper reinforcements (for the eyes) just as my customer had described. The benefits to using paper reinforcements are two-fold. First, even if the monsters aren’t uniform, it’s still very easy to see the rhythm each one represents, which makes them easy to read. Second, drawing precision isn’t necessary. No matter how misshapen the circle, it still looks like a rhythm monster.
I tried out the paper reinforcements with half notes as well. The curved line represents the length of the sound, just as a reminder that the second beat is not silent.
The color coding labels worked really well too. If you’re short on time, these are definitely the way to go!
Overall, I think this activity would be great for a variety of age levels and is a cheap way to play with stickers in music class!
What do you think? Could you see yourself trying this out? Let me know what you think of this activity in the comments section.
Thanks for reading!
Jennifer
