Iconic Rhythm Patterns

If your child attends Journey Montessori they may have brought a note card home today with their name on one side and some lines on the other.  This probably looks very confusing!  We are working on recognizing rhythmic patterns.  Until now the students have echoed rhythm patterns that I clap or play, or created their own using vocal sounds.  Now they are matching the rhythm pattern with an icon.  This is very similar to the way that we learn to talk and read.  First we learn to make sounds and words by echoing and experimenting ourselves, next we learn to identify our ABC's, and then we learn to put them together to form words and sentences.  The children are learning to match what they hear to the icons they see.  The lines on one side of their note card match up with how many claps their name gets (or the number of syllables their name has).  The students learned how to clap their names, then we drew lines for each of the claps on their card.  The lines are the way we are representing the rhythm their name creates.  The students are just looking at the icons (lines) not the notes themselves yet but for those of you who are curious where this activity is leading here are the note values that lines correspond with;
   

Another activity we do in class that uses icons to create rhythm patterns is using note cards that have stickers on them.  One of the note cards has the following stickers on it:

By using the icons (fruit) the children have clapped a four beat rhythm pattern!  Once they have mastered reading rhythm patterns using the icons then we would change the icon to the note and clap the rhythm pattern that way.