As we continued with our work on ‘Swing-a-long’, we felt the 2-time and 3-time beats by moving along to the music only this time instead of doing so alone, we had to stay in time with a partner too! This added a little bit of challenge as we had to not only think about staying in time with the music, but also another person!

We then practised using 2 and 3-time beats by creating our own rhythms with a partner. The rest of the crew then had to listen and watch carefully as we performed our rhythms to decide whether it was a 2-beat or 3-beat rhythm.

We began our new unit ‘Swing-a-long with Shostakovich’ by listening to the piece of music and moving using a swaying motion. We tried to keep in time to the beat, thinking about not moving too fast or too slow. We chanted 1, 2, 3 as we did it to try and keep us in time. We discussed that this was called a 3-time beat.

In the second section of the song, the beat changes slightly. To show this, we tapped our knees on 1, then clapped our hands on 2. We found out this was called a 2-time beat.

We talked about the composer of this piece and how Dmitri Shostakovich was a famous composer who wrote jazz suites made up of dances. One piece called ‘Polka’ has a 2-time beat, whereas the ‘Waltz’ has a 3-time beat. We listened to both pieces and counted out loud to recognise the difference in beats, before we began to move our bodies to both beats.

We then became musical detectives and looked at how you could create 2-beat and 3-beat rhythms using body percussion. We listened to a selection of short pieces of music and used body percussion to help us decide whether the piece has a 2-time beat or a 3-time beat. We were really good at this and it shows we have a good ear for recognising patterns in music!