Drumming KWA Kids

For the past several weeks, my friend, Brandon, and I have been tag-team teaching our third and fourth graders. He teaches basic drumming, and I teach mini-keyboards and music staff reading. The kids really seem to be enjoying the class. The pic accompanying this post shows a few of the girls enthusiastically getting into what Brandon is teaching. It is amazing what a creative teacher can accomplish with just a set of inexpensive plastic garbage cans and a pair of drum sticks. Tonight, Brandon was transitioning the kids from the fruit rhythm counting (grape, kiwi, blueberry) he had utilized for the past couple of sessions to the more traditional beat counting method (1&2&3&4&). The kids caught on pretty quickly.

The full third and fourth grade class is pretty large for how and what we teach, so we divide the class into two groups each week. This evening while the girls were drumming, the third and fourth grade boys were taking a baritone ukulele class next door. The girls had just returned from that class a few minutes prior. (For more information on how we utilize fruit syllables in teaching rhythm, check out the blog post dated October 18, 2016. For more information about our baritone ukulele class, see the blog post dated October 19, 2016.)