really need some help with rhythm and timing (music teachers especially)

[AngieW in Texas]

My 13yo has been playing guitar for 1.5 years now. She is having a lot of difficulty with rhythm and timing.

 

This is something that she has always had a lot of difficulty with. She did vision therapy when she was 6yo and could never get through the rhythm and timing activities without me there to give her the beat. Hearing it wasn't enough. She had to actually feel the beat. When she was supposed to jump to a metronome, she couldn't get the timing right. If I held her hands and jumped with her, she could match her jump to mine. It only worked if I was jumping AND holding her hands. She had to feel the beat. It didn't seem to stick either. No matter how many times we did it, she still needed me to jump with her while holding hands to be able to do it.

 

She LOVES music and playing guitar and is getting very frustrated because she can't hear the beat in the music and keep what she's playing on a steady beat.

 

Her teacher has advised her to use a metronome, but that isn't helping. She can't seem to play with the metronome at all and just gets frustrated.

 

Do you have any basic (very basic) things to do to help with rhythm and timing?

[Hedgehog]

Three things come to mind:

 

Do you listen to a wide variety of music, a lot of the time?

 

Does she ever dance to music?

 

Has she ever listened to a heartbeat?

[Dmmetler]

Whole body-walk, move, jump. Sway back and forth. Gradually add more complicated patterns. Symmetric and bilateral (using both sides of the body together and separately. If you have access to a trampoline, have her try jumping in a steady beat (it's usually easier to get/maintain this on the trampoline because the trampoline will tend to fall into the pattern and you have to work to get off it). The easiest steady beat to keep will be at about her resting pulse rate.

 

Tap the beat on her shoulders or lap, while sitting behind her and listening to the music (sometimes, it's easier to bond to beat in music than on a metronome), especially with music with a very, very strong beat. Encourage her to tap as you tap, and match your movements (the scene in Mr. Holland's Opus, where he's actually tapping on a football helmet worn by the student to help the student learn to find beat 1 and 3 so he can play bass drum is exaggerated, but is this same technique).

 

All this off the guitar. Unfortunately, while having good beat competence is needed for any instrument, the traditional "rhythm section" instruments (guitar, drums, bass, and piano) are the ones where it's MOST essential to have strong beat competence, because you're setting the beat for the melodic instruments to follow. You can learn rhythms in melody based on how they sound, even if you struggle to feel them, but it really has to be felt on a rhythm section instrument.

 

Good luck!

[ChristusG]

Sounds like exactly the reason DD7's therapist is pushing to get her into motor therapy.

 

I don't really agree though....some people just cannot keep a beat.

[Dmmetler]

Sounds like exactly the reason DD7's therapist is pushing to get her into motor therapy.

 

I don't really agree though....some people just cannot keep a beat.

 

Keeping a beat, as far as music or dance goes, isn't all that important to life. You don't have to be a musician to appreciate music or dance well to appreciate dance.

 

But beat bonding has such a high linkage to success in reading, writing and other academics that it's a real concern when a child hasn't "gotten it" by age 7. While I'm sure there are children who cannot keep a steady beat, but can coordinate their eyes and their bodies, usually it goes the other way-and it's been shown, again and again, that if a child can gain that internal sense of beat, it helps academically, too.

 

I was a music teacher for 7 years at the "focused literacy" magnet school for the district-IE, the one school that offered OG-type phonics instruction without a special ed label being required, and therefore was strongly suggested to every parent if their child, at age 5, was not picking up on reading in the "balanced literacy" program that the district offered in the neighborhood schools. And I ended up with a very good track record as far as identifying the children, by the end of 1st grade, who would eventually end up with special ed DXs-because while many of our 1st graders were struggling with reading, beat competence and patterning/sequencing in Orff classes tended to be very weak in those who turned out to require even more specific therapy than a good, solid phonics program.

[livingnlearning]

Whole body-walk, move, jump. Sway back and forth. Gradually add more complicated patterns. Symmetric and bilateral (using both sides of the body together and separately. If you have access to a trampoline, have her try jumping in a steady beat (it's usually easier to get/maintain this on the trampoline because the trampoline will tend to fall into the pattern and you have to work to get off it). The easiest steady beat to keep will be at about her resting pulse rate.

 

Tap the beat on her shoulders or lap, while sitting behind her and listening to the music (sometimes, it's easier to bond to beat in music than on a metronome), especially with music with a very, very strong beat. Encourage her to tap as you tap, and match your movements (the scene in Mr. Holland's Opus, where he's actually tapping on a football helmet worn by the student to help the student learn to find beat 1 and 3 so he can play bass drum is exaggerated, but is this same technique).

 

All this off the guitar. Unfortunately, while having good beat competence is needed for any instrument, the traditional "rhythm section" instruments (guitar, drums, bass, and piano) are the ones where it's MOST essential to have strong beat competence, because you're setting the beat for the melodic instruments to follow. You can learn rhythms in melody based on how they sound, even if you struggle to feel them, but it really has to be felt on a rhythm section instrument.

 

Good luck!

 

I agree with all of this-when my daughter was 9 and starting guitar lessons she couldn't hold the beat either. We incessantly clapped, swayed, nodded our heads, ect to the beat of every song on the radio. I played music with a deliberate beat/backbeat/beat/backbeat and felt every one... when she did play on the guitar I would sometimes tap her shoulder in time and I always directed the beat with my hand or counted for her, then gradually stepped away until I was giving her just the first beat of every measure. For her at least, it was too much to keep track of until she was very comfortable with the guitar. She needed to internalize keeping the beat away from the guitar and then she could add it to the juggling mix of fingers, strings, brain, and beat. Even in my own playing experience the metronome was a tool to set the pace but it never kept me ON pace, you need to be somewhat able to stay on the beat in your head.

[KungFuPanda]

Have you ever had her physically hold a radio or boom box? It doesn't so much work with an iPod, but if you have stereo speakers you can touch, she may need to FEEL the music until she can tap out the downbeat on her foot.

 

I very occasionally get dance students with no natural sense of rhythm. With a great deal of effort, they can overcome this enough to perform a beginner choreography without being off, but they have to work and they have to want it.

[AngieW in Texas]

But beat bonding has such a high linkage to success in reading, writing and other academics that it's a real concern when a child hasn't "gotten it" by age 7. While I'm sure there are children who cannot keep a steady beat, but can coordinate their eyes and their bodies, usually it goes the other way-and it's been shown, again and again, that if a child can gain that internal sense of beat, it helps academically, too.

 

I was a music teacher for 7 years at the "focused literacy" magnet school for the district-IE, the one school that offered OG-type phonics instruction without a special ed label being required, and therefore was strongly suggested to every parent if their child, at age 5, was not picking up on reading in the "balanced literacy" program that the district offered in the neighborhood schools. And I ended up with a very good track record as far as identifying the children, by the end of 1st grade, who would eventually end up with special ed DXs-because while many of our 1st graders were struggling with reading, beat competence and patterning/sequencing in Orff classes tended to be very weak in those who turned out to require even more specific therapy than a good, solid phonics program.

 

Interesting. She's also dyslexic (dyseidetic type). She is reading at grade level now, but it was an enormous struggle to get there.

 

Are you at all familiar with the Woodcock Johnson Cognitive Abilities test? She took it recently as part of a psychological workup for anxiety. The huge red flag for me in that was that her visual-auditory learning subtest came in at <0.1%ile. Since we were there for a psychological workup rather than an educational one, I didn't get an explanation for it. I did a lot of researching and did find that test had a very high correlation with anxiety (which is what she was there for). It seems to indicate that she has an extremely difficult time with remembering things that have been learned previously, which fits with the way that she hasn't really progressed in math for the past three years. She learns it and really does get it, but then forgets whether 1/3 means 1 divided by 3 or 3 divided by 1. Then she'll do much higher level math the next day with no problem and then go back to completely forgetting some other very basic thing that she knew really well.

Edited August 7, 2011 by AngieW in Texas