This lesson focuses on playing and identifying dotted rhythms within a piece of music.

Strengths of this lesson include thorough planning, use of good examples, and checking for student understanding throughout the lesson. Weaknesses of this lesson includes not accommodating students with exceptionalities or learning difficulties, leaving out student assessment, and not connecting to the National Standards. Following the Direct Instruction model, in the introduction and review phase, the teacher reviewed previous note values with the students before introducing the new concept of dotted rhythms. The teacher informally assessed student knowledge through questioning and engaged them with a hook that showed students how a piece of music would sound like with and without dotted rhythms. During the second phase of presentation, the teacher demonstrated how to count dotted rhythms and explained the components of counting these rhythms. For the third phase of guided practice, the teacher had students clap a passage of music with dotted rhythms after the teacher did, and again with the teacher clapping along with the students. In the fourth phase of independent practice, students wrote in the counting for two measures of dotted rhythms and then were called on to demonstrate their knowledge by clapping the rhythms aloud. This lesson deviates from the model in that the independent practice does not match with the guided practice that the teacher did with the students. It also did not make any other outside connections to other areas at the end of the lesson, therefore, students were not able to transfer their knowledge to other pieces of music besides the one example that the students were working from for the entire lesson. For future lessons, an assessment of student understanding could be incorporated by having the students turn in a copy of their written in counting in their scores. Introducing a new piece of music, that had dotted rhythms in it, and asking students to sight-read the rhythms by clapping them would be a good way to generalize this concept.