Before I taught in the music classroom, I had been a private voice and piano music teacher for all ages. After more than a decade of teaching, I began to realize there were certain ways I had to adjust my teaching style for each age group. Older students struggled with different topics than younger students. And in each age group of kids, I noticed there were things that came more easily. Jean Piaget was a psychologist and cognitive theorist who also noticed there are stages in child development. According to his theory, there are four stages.
- Sensorimotor Stage – (0-2 years)
- Pre-operational Stage (2-7 years)
- Concrete Operational Stage (7-11 years)
- Formal Operational Stage (12+ years)
The Pre-Operational Stage
The pre-operational stage includes roughly preschoolers through second graders. According to Piaget, during the pre-operational stage children develop language and begin to think with abstract thought. They begin using “pretend play,” drawing pictures, and thinking about the past. In the concrete operational stage (third through fifth graders) children start learning logical, concrete rules about objects (Reynolds). Being familiar with Piaget’s four stages of child development might help you organize your lesson plan in a way that gets on the level of where your students are thinking and thus, boost overall engagement in your music class. Although this article doesn’t go into all four stages of Piaget’s theory, we will discuss how you can use this information to create effective strategies for teaching rhythm and timing in elementary.
- Imitation: Using Call and Response to Teach Rhythm and Timing – One way early elementary students learn is by mimicking the people around them. Using call and response to teach rhythm and timing is a great way to engage the class and help students build confidence in using rhythms and tempos.
- Symbolic Play: Go on a Musical Journey – Why do young kids love the song “Walking in the Jungle?” I think it’s because they have an opportunity to not only jump around and move but to also imagine. Use songs with stories attached to go on musical journeys with your students. Teach them tempo through a song that goes faster and faster but that has a story attached to it. You can use pretend play to create stories for the notes or instruments.
- Drawing: Kinesthetic Music Learning – Take time away from the music itself to let students draw musical ideas or express music theory through art. There are so many things you can do in general to make music learning more kinesthetic. For music timing, students can draw a picture to represent the tempo changes or use blocks closer together to represent faster and further apart to represent slower. They can also use play dough to shape notes and rests.
- Mental Imagery – At this stage, you can start showing children musical terms and notation symbols and associating it with their definitions. You can begin to relate these new concepts to the world around them and to what they are learning in other classes to reinforce ideas. I love using PowerPoints to create a visual that is separate from the music. I also use the Kodaly Rhythm method, although there are many other methods to choose from.
- Verbal Evocation of Events: Oral Music Assessment – You can begin to let students transcribe rhythms themselves. You can also teach them to identify tempos. This is a great stage to perform oral rather than written assessments.
Upper Elementary Music and the Concrete Operational Stage
- Conservation and Reversibility: The Details of Music – Conservation and reversibility is when it is understood that an object will stay the same even though it changes in appearance. Students at this stage are able to understand that a theme in a sonata can be varied and then come back. This means you can introduce longer classical works to students. They can also perform music with a more nuanced dynamic or with time signatures and tempos that fluctuate.
- Classification – Give students a chance during your lesson to classify the different musical elements in a piece of music. You might ask, “What is the difference between tempo and rhythm?” A more detailed lesson about different time signatures can begin at this age.
- Seriation – Seriation is the ability to organize items in order. Help students organize the musical elements they are learning about. For example, they can organize tempos from slowest to fastest.
Having an awareness of the developmental stages of your students will give you an opportunity to focus your lesson in on activities that will enhance their learning experience. As teachers, it allows us to get creative with our understanding of how music is taught so we can get our message across better. I think this is the funnest part of lesson planning. Don’t be afraid to try something new. In fact, if you find an interesting activity, please leave it in the comment below to share with other teachers.
References
Reynolds, PhD, Akilah. “What are Piaget’s stages of development, and what are examples of each?” https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/325030#summary (Accessed 5-21-2024)