Know Your Notes

Starter

Copy the following handout onto card and cut out around the dotted lines, forming 14 separate cards. Make sure you have enough cards or sets for every student or for every pair/small group of students in your class. You may wish to laminate these for future use:

Know Your Notes: Cards

This starter can be organised in a number of ways:

• Working in pairs or in small groups, students can play a simple game of ‘pairs’ or ‘snap’, matching the beginnings of sentences with corresponding endings.
• The teacher calls out a number (eg ‘seven and a half’) and, in a race against the clock, students try to find a group of notes which total that number of beats (eg semibreve + minim + crotchet + a quaver equals seven and a half beats).
• Students arrange the cards from the longest note value (semibreve) to the shortest (quaver).

Plenary

Ask students to make up some ‘musical maths sums’. An example of a sum would be: a crotchet (one beat) plus a minim (two beats) multiplied by a semibreve (four beats) equals 12. In pairs, they could write a sum for their partner to solve.