I have chosen to teach a Rhythm unit to help increase the level of counting ability and ability to

play on time. The Pine Ridge band has a very difficult time counting rhythms and knowing how

to play them. Rhythm is a vital part of the music making process. I am using a book titled “101

Rhythmic Rest Patterns” by Grover C Yaus. It features rhythms of varying difficulty that help

expose musicians to common rhythms seen in music. While some rhythms are difficult, they are

all achievable. The standards approached will be MU.912.S.2 : Development of skills,

techniques, and processes in the arts strengthens our ability to remember, focus on, process,

and sequence information. This will be improved by constant exposure to many different types

of rhythms that can be applied and transferred to all areas of music. Rhythm is a building block

that is necessary for all further exploration. The other standard I will be using is MU.912.S.3.3 :

Transcribe aurally presented songs into melodic and/or rhythmic notation to show synthesis of

aural and notational skills. The knowledge of rhythmic notation is important because if you can

write rhythm down it is easy to play rhythms. I will also give them a uniform way of counting

rhythms to ensure that my assessments are fair and accurate.

Description of GraphMaker Charts

The chart above is a graph that shows pre test and post test scores out of 22 for the first test.

There are several students who managed to get a perfect score on the post test, which you can

see as indicated by the red lines to the right. Every student made at least some improvement on

this assessment. The alone redline on the right is representative of the student who scored a

zero on the pre test.

This chart is representative of the second pre and post test assessments that were conducted.

On this chart the post test is represented in Red and the pre test is represented in blue. All but

one student made improvements, and that one student had received a perfect score on the

pretest.
This chart represents the average scores received on the first pre and post test. There was

significant improvement.
This chart represents the average scores of the classes on the second pre and post test given.

There was significant improvement.