As piano pieces get more complex so, of course, do the rhythms. Quavers, semi-quavers, dotted-notes and rests all start making appearances in pieces of music as students progress through the initial stages of learning the piano. I love using things that I have around the house to engage learners and help them understand what’s going on in music in different ways. Creating rhythms out of lego bricks can be really beneficial in understanding and working out how rhythms are put together according to the number of beats in a bar.
Visualising rhythm through colour, brick length, and shape, and physically building those rhythms with our own hands, can suddenly make sense of all the black dots and tails on a page. It’s a great way for kinaesthetic and visual learners (that is, learners who like to “do” and learners who learn through “seeing”) to grasp the way that rhythms are built up.
