Made for the iPad: Drawing Rhythm Notes

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The Let’s Draw Series helps students learn how to draw notes, rests, and clef signs. These symbols, which are so familiar to musicians, can be a challenge for students to draw. The graphics also show students the correct symbol placement on the staff in a step by step manner.

First students trace the symbol. There they draw missing lines which helps them focus on the placement of the symbol. The final step is to draw the complete symbol.

Print on card stock and laminate or put them in sheet protectors and use an erasable marker. These large sized symbols are printed one to a page in order to focus on individual symbols. Set the page orientation to landscape for printing. Landscape orientation and the large size makes this set easy to draw symbols using an iPad.

When I teach students how to draw notes, I like to start with the whole note and then show how to add lines to make it a half note. Fill in a half note and it becomes a quarter note. This way students see that every note has a note head the same size as a whole note. If I don’t do that, I usually have little teeny quarter and eighth notes and giant, bloated whole notes! I’ve also seen students waste time in ear training by, for example, erasing half notes, when all they need to do is fill in the half note to make it a quarter note.

One reason I like to make worksheets for a mobile device is because I can use lots of color and not worry about the cost of printing! But these work equally as well when printed!