Today, I'm excited to be joining Lindsay Jervis' linky party, to blog about music manipulatives!

To read Lindsay's blog as well as the blogs of other music educators, just click on the picture above!

I just love the dollar shelves at Target, not just for fun goodies for my daughters, but for teaching! Recently, I found bags of pumpkins, gourds, acorns, and leaves and decided I had to use them in my classroom!

I bought seven bags and stored them in fun buckets I also found at Target, like this:

Then I used them in learning centers with my first graders. They just learned ta and ti-ti, so at one of the centers, the students found the two buckets. Then, they emptied the buckets and individually created 4-beat patterns, using any of the autumn manipulatives they wanted. Sample patterns are below:

The first pattern would be leaf acorn gourd acorn, and the second pattern (read from left to right as the student wrote it) would be gourd acorn pumpkin acorn. 

After the students wrote the patterns, I told them to say the pattern while clapping the rhythm, and then after that, the students had to figure out the pattern with ta and ti-ti. For the patterns above, the first pattern would be ta ti-ti ta ti-ti and the second pattern would be ta ti-ti ti-ti ti-ti. 

After the students wrote a 4-beat pattern, they put the manipulatives back into one big pile, and then wrote another pattern! Some of the students started writing patterns that were longer than 4 beats, which was fine with me--as long as they could figure out the patterns with rhythm syllables!

This was a fun, hands-on way to practice ta and ti-ti. Although it's past Halloween, the manipulatives seemed more autumn-themed to be than Halloween-themed, so I will keep using them...at least until after Thanksgiving!

Thanks to Lindsay for hosting this party! If you are also a music blogger, feel free to link up by clicking on the picture above.

Make sure to check back tomorrow for my 700-followers giveaway! Thanks for reading!