The Value of a Rest

• Meghan Kennedy
• Posted 5/18/21
• 0 comments

In my past four years of teaching, I’ve discovered my students are easily confused by the quarter rest. I often hear “0” when I ask my students how many beats a rest gets. They mix up the value of the rest’s beats and the value of the rest’s sounds.  

I’ve gone through trial and error of finding activities that work best for reinforcing the beat values of rest. In this article, I will share a deliciously fun activity for presenting quarter rest for the first time and a fun game for practicing rests with older students.  

Presenting Quarter Rest 

Let’s talk about an engaging activity for presenting quarter rest for the first time. This activity is delicious and fun because it involves muffins! When we first went to completely digital learning, my 1st graders were ready to learn quarter rest.  

I wanted to find an engaging way to present rest through our recorded video lessons. I was making muffins one afternoon and suddenly made a connection to my lesson plans! To demonstrate rest more concretely, I could use muffins to represent sounds and plates to represent beats.  

That way, my students could see that the plate (and the beat) would always be constant. I created a sequence of five lessons to explore quarter rest. I also wrote a fun song to go along with the presentation of quarter rest.

Check out my Lesson Sketch Musical Muffins for the complete lesson plan.  PowerPoints and printable manipulatives for this lesson are sold at my Teachers Pay Teachers store.  

I find that students are more engaged in the lesson when they have something visual to focus on during quarter rest preparation and presentation. When I reference placing plates, muffins, and rhythm cards, students can manipulate these items, increasing their excitement for the lesson.  Using manipulatives also provides a tangible way to explain that the beat exists even when there is no sound – the empty plate! 

Check out these activities from my classroom!  

Practicing Rests 

Now let’s talk about how I created engaging activities for practicing rest with any grade level. My students love bowling – so I brought it into our classroom!  

Bowling is a fun activity that helps reinforce beat values at any grade level using appropriate rhythm, especially rests. I take empty water bottles, paint them white, fill them with ¼ cup – ½ cup of beads for weight, and write rhythms on each in black sharpie. 

I have various sets to use with different grade levels, depending on what rhythms they know so far. When we play, I split students into two teams. Each team has a set of 6 water bottles. 

Students use a tennis ball as their bowling ball. To keep score, students add up the beat value of the pins that they knocked down on during their turn.  (see example in pictures below) This game is a fun way to have students practice differentiating between counting beats and counting syllables. 

If the student adds up the beat value correctly, they get that many points. If not, the students add no points to their team’s total.  The students re-set the pins, and the next student takes their turn. 

Check out the images below!  

Join Me Online! 

• Follow me on Instagram @musicmrsk, where I share my journey as an elementary music teacher almost daily. 
• You can also check out my Teachers Pay Teachers store Music Mrs. K.  
• Musical Muffins Lessons on Teachers Pay Teachers
• Please e-mail me with any questions musicwithmrsk@gmail.com