Lesson Plan - Year 9 Tones and semitones, & Introducing the Major Scale

1. Tone and semitone circle game

Hands in the air if your a tone, bend down and touch your toes if your a semitone. (get it wrong & your out!)

2. Recap of last lesson

3. Aural testing & notepad work

• Tones and semitones - give a note on the board and play a tone/semitone for students to write down and include any accidentals. • Match the melody on the board with the melody that was played by me? • In groups of 4 work out and write down the rhythm to a well known melody. Then clap it to the class - can you guess the song?

5. Scale game on the stairs

• Write up on the whiteboard with semitones marked and explain what a scale is. (Explain the pattern of tones and semitones. This pattern can be used on any starting note to create a major scale.

• Whole tone with 5 students. • Sing the scale. • Add students and arrange into a major scale. • 8 students on the stairs, each student has a number 1 to 8. (sing the scale) • Rearrange the numbers of each group once. • Get each student to walk and say the tones and semitones of the stairs. • Arrange tones and semitones on the stairs to explain different scale types.

4. Introducing the major scale

• What is a scale? - explain on the whiteboard (write on your notepad). • Play on the piano - can you hear the tone and semitones? • Is this scale major or other (minor) on the guitar. • Work through worksheets. • Test some scales on notepad work with a starting note on the board (Write the rest of the scale from the given root note and mark the semitones in using a curved line).

6. Hand out and work through major scale worksheets

Luke Bairstow Scale Definition

In music theory, a scale is any set of musical notes ordered by fundamental frequency or pitch. A scale ordered by increasing pitch is an ascending scale, and a scale ordered by decreasing pitch is a descending scale. Some scales contain different pitches when ascending than when descending. For example, the Melodic minor scale. Often, especially in the context of the common practice period, most or all of the melody and harmony of a musical work is built using the notes of a single scale, which can be conveniently represented on a staff with a standard key signature. Due to the principle of octave equivalence, scales are generally considered to span a single octave, with higher or lower octaves simply repeating the pattern. A musical scale represents a division of the octave space into a certain number of scale steps, a scale step being the recognisable distance (or interval) between two successive notes of the scale.

Luke Bairstow