Rhythm and Number Rhymes

What is rhythm?

According to Dictionary.com, rhythm is a movement or procedure with uniform or patterned recurrence of a beat, accent, or the like. Rhythm is present in every song or piece of music.

It’s also present in many poems and nursery rhymes.

It can be simple or complicated. It may be composed of many different pauses and repetitions or just a simple standard, 1234, beat.

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We recently explored rhythm through the use of the book, One, Two, Skip a Few! First Number Rhymes by Roberta Arenson.

This book is full of classic number rhymes that you may already be familiar with, such as “One potato, two potato” and “One, two, three, four, five, Once I caught a fish alive.”

All of the rhymes have a definite rhythm to them, which made this activity lots of fun.

We started with simple clapping.

After we established a rhythm, we used the clapping to set our speed. We explored different speeds, trying fast and slow.

We also tried a simple leg pat. Pat, pat, pat, pat.

Once we mastered this simple rhythm, we moved on to something a bit more complicated and combined the claps and the pats.

Not only did we have fun, but we learned about a basic music term, rhythm.

We learned that rhythm can help us remember the words to a rhyme. We also learned to have a whole lot of fun and add a new dimension to nursery rhymes by providing the accompanying rhythm.

How do you use rhythm in your play?