First Grade: Thanksgiving Rhythms

I wasn't planning on doing much with my 1st grade class today because they had gotten ahead of the other classes and it was their Thanksgiving Feast, so I figured they would be wound up.  But, then I realized it was my gifted class and I thought showing a video would be more work than just doing a lesson with them, so spur of the moment this is what I decided to do.

I had seen this worksheet pinned (it's a free download from Teacher's Pay Teacher's):

I like this worksheet a lot but I hadn't planned this out, so I didn't have copies and didn't have time to download it.  Plus, this may have been a bit over my 1st graders heads.  So, instead of 2 beat rhythms, we simplified to words that matched Ta and a column of words that matched ti-ti.  

I was impressed with the words they came up with, especially Mayflower.  It took a bit of prompting but they discovered that it combined the two note values.  Now, this was my Gifted 1st grade group, so I'm not sure this would have worked quite as well with my other classes.  

Once we had our lists, we used white boards and in pairs created 8 beat rhythm patterns.  They could use any of the words they wanted but they had to make sure and practice clapping their rhythm.  After about 6 minutes of writing and clapping, we performed our rhythm patterns for each other.  

Afterwards, I recorded a few of the groups performing their patterns.  What was great is some of them were already trying to use ta and ti-ti instead of the words to read the patterns.  

Take a look at the first pattern in the video.  These girls used Mayflower and figured out on their own that it would take up two beats.  I thought that was pretty spectacular for 1st graders!