Rhythm Olympics

Dear Band Directors,

Attached is a proposal I hope to make at the Charleston County Band Director's meeting in August. To save time, I thought I would send it out to you prior to the meeting for you to look over and respond to. I am proposing to set up a county wide "Rhythm Olympics" Tournament to help aide interested students to prepare for County, Region, and All-State Honor Band auditions in the area that is probably most difficult to prepare for: counting new rhythms and sight reading. As most of you know, I spend a considerable amount of time researching and writing about this area and sincerely wish to positively contribute to our instrumental students here in Charleston County. My initial proposal is somewhat scaled back from what I hope will eventually evolve into. I want to start out slow, to guarantee a positive impact on our first time participants.

You can read the basic outline in the attachment, but allow me to highlight some areas I was very concerned about in setting up this proposal:

• My first goal is to minimize the time requirements on the part of each band director. Once the students select their teams, they are the ones responsible for preparation. The only thing that the band directors may have to help out with is to provide an area for the teams to practice and help out teams that have trouble figuring how to count certain categories of rhythms.
• We all know our students are naturally very competitive. It is tough to focus an extended time in class on rhythm reading, so, let's "dangle a carrot" and let the students motivate themselves.
• The "Team Format" will allow students to help motivate each other, but still have the option of practicing as little or as much as they want. Some times we can be effective as educators by just "getting out of the way."
• Teams should devise a systematic strategy to review the full rhythm vocabulary in preparation for competition. This will help accelerate their exposure to a much wider range of rhythms, more so than they would probably cover up to that time in class. Especially coming off marching band season.
• Increased confidence in sight reading, not only for up the upcoming honor band auditions, but should also carry through and I think you will see benefits for Concert Band Contest Festival as well.
• With the restraints of our class curriculum, it is hard to come with a systematic strategy to help our students prepare for the sight reading portion of honor band auditions. This might be a fairly simplistic solution to this problem.
• In your lesson plans, use this as practical technological application since your students must navigate and acquire the needed competition material off of the Internet. As a band director, you don't even have to provide any of the needed materials for them other than the initial registration form.
• It will be easy to sell this activity to our community, businesses, and administrators as a very positive academic experience for our students and help promote publicity for our county instrumental programs. Most can relate to "spelling bees" and I hope to capitalize on this with gaining additional positive publicity for our counties instrumental programs with our own version, the "Rhythm Olympics."

Sincerely,

R. Moon

Individual

( get .pdf )

Team