Ties, Slurs, and Hold Ups

This is part two of my lesson on distinguishing between ties and slurs. Click here for the first part. 

Now that my students were exposed to some slurs and ties (hopefully some groups were able to sort them that way) it was time to get into the nitty gritty. As a class, we discussed that both slurs and ties use the same symbol but they mean different things. We went over the definition of a tie and how it is different from a slur. 

TPT #2 - Hold Ups -  Selected Response
Hold ups are pretty easy to understand. 

• The teacher will ask a question 
• The student will "hold up" a card that demonstrates their response.

That is all. The authors of Total Participation Techniques go through a number of ways you can vary this idea by preparing cards such as multiple choice, true/false, fact/opinion, number cards etc...

For this activity, you guessed it, I prepared cards that were labelled "Slur" and "Tie." Ideally I would have made them double-sided but my brain wasn't working and I couldn't figure it out at that point in time. Looking back now, I would also have made both of the cards the same colour. Oh well. 

I put up a number of different examples of slurs and ties on the Smart Board. I revealed the slur or tie and the students held up the card that they thought matched what was on the board. I liked doing this activity because everyone was involved and were learning in some way. Yes, some students may have just looked at someone else's card and this activity may be on the lower end of the critical thinking scale, but right now I am all about getting everyone in my classes to just do something! 

The GPS Task that they were working on introduced them to playing a tie in a piece of music so we did a few examples of how to play a tie ("On the 1st note of the Bb concert scale play a half note tied to a quarter note. On the 2nd note of the Bb concert scale play a quarter note tied to another quarter note.) before we looked closely at the piece.