Rhythm Wars: Poison Edition

Earlier this week I posted on the Rhythm Wars videos that I created.  My kiddos loved them.  My principal loved them.  You see, we're a movement focus school.  Last year was our opening year and we won a $100,000 movement grant from ASAP.  A lot of what we're doing is based on a book called Spark by John Ratey.  

Now, any Kodály teacher will tell you that it's completely natural to incorporate movement into the music program.  But when my principal came in and my kiddos were using light sabers to perform rhythm patterns and moving quickly to change places he liked the integration of the movement into my classroom.  

My kiddos were the ones that helped with my inspiration to create corresponding poison games to go with the Rhythm Wars reading practice videos I made.  Here's a little demo.  I will preface it by saying I thought and played around with having music at the beginning but I didn't want to take the focus away from the students reading the directions and then in turn, learning the poison pattern for the game:

I have made a video for each of the following rhythm concepts:

1. ta ti-ti
2. rest (which includes ta and ti-ti)
3. half note
4. tika-tika
5. ti-tika
6. tika-ti
7. syncopa
8. tom-ti
9. ti-tom
10. tim-ka
11. ti-kam

Each video is about 5 minutes in length and comes two forms: stick notation and stick notation with note heads.  I think that the ta ti-ti, rest and half note files might be a little long for first and second grade BUT would be great practice for playing recorder in 3rd, 4th or 5th grades!  Are available at my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

Hope you're having a great weekend!