I wonder if you’ve ever had this experience. Let’s imagine you’ve planned to play a passing game in your class. You anticipate playing it a few rounds as part of the lesson segment and then you’ll move on to another activity with the same song. But once you introduce the game and get going, you realize students are all over the place in terms of their beat passing skills. You have students moving it way to fast because they think it’s hot potato, students passing way too slow because they’re trying to follow directions and be careful, and you have some students who don’t know what to do when they get the ball.
You’re not alone with this. Passing games can be deceptively difficult - even for our older students, especially when we get into passing games where we have to coordinate when to pick up and when to drop an object in front of a partner.
Today we’ll talk about some ways to scaffold passing games so students are setup for success, regardless of their passing skills. We’ll break this into lower and upper elementary, with specific steps and considerations for each.
Let’s jump in.
Lower Elementary
One of the best things we can do is not to start with the passing game itself, but actually to start as a whole-class, kinesthetic activity. There are a few options for this, depending on what students need. Let’s start with the most basic one and move from there.
The key to all these scaffolds is that every single student in the room is keeping the beat in some way, even when they’re not passing the object.
Pat the Steady Beat
The first thing to check in on is that students are actually aware of the steady beat, and they have some level of accuracy in their beat performance. Let’s use Bee Bee Bumblebee as an example.
Instead of passing an object around the circle and someone being “out,” lead students in patting a steady beat all together. At the end of the rhyme, the teacher calls on a student to decide where the class will keep the beat next (elbow, shoulder, shoe, neighbor’s shoe, etc.). After the next round, the student who was just chosen calls on the next student to decide where to keep the beat.
This adaptation of the game keeps things interesting because the beat changes with each iteration of the game. We’re also asking students to choose each other instead of keeping the ownership of the game exclusively with us.
Backing up and looking at beat competency is a critical first step. If students don’t keep the steady beat in their own personal kinesthetic space, they’re going to have a hard time tracking beat when it’s spread outside the circle.
Read More: Guide to Teaching Steady Beat
Listen to the Podcast: The First Weeks of Teaching Kindergarten Music
Track the Beat by Pointing
The next extension is for students to help you point the steady beat around the circle. As students speak the rhyme or sing the song, everyone points in a steady beat, as if they’re tracking an imaginary ball.
This is a convenient way to play the game. First, we’ve introduced the core element of the game itself: passing and elimination. Second, we have a built-in self-assessment with beat passing because everyone in the room should land on the same person at the end of the rhyme. If students don’t land on the same person as the rest of the class, they have a clear indicator that their beat was off from the steady beat of the rhyme. From there, they can adjust and try again in the next round without being singled out. For this version of the elimination game, the person who is out can pat a steady beat in the middle of the circle, or pat a steady beat on a hand drum.
Pointing the steady beat instead of passing an object is also an established way to play many early childhood games, such as Zapatitos Blancos. If this is the scaffold students need, we can adjust many more passing and elimination games to use pointing instead of passing an object. Students will still have a successful, musical, and pedagogically sound experience with this option.
Walk Behind the Object
For this scaffold, we’ll add the passing object and play the game almost as normal. The difference is that the teacher is walking behind the circle as students pass the ball, and pointing to the student who should have the object. In essence, we’re tracking the beat around the room as students play the game. This scaffold gives students the opportunity to play the traditional passing game, but also gives them a visual support.
The most important part of this scaffold, like the others, is that everyone in the circle keeps the steady beat in some capacity when they don’t have the object. Students can either point with you as you move around the circle (like the second scaffold) or pat the steady beat somewhere on their bodies (like the first scaffold).
Passing Too Slowly or Too Quickly
The purpose of the passing game is to practice steady beat. The purpose of steady beat is that it keeps us together as an ensemble. When students pass too slowly or too quickly, they’re adjusting the tempo of the steady beat.
If students are playing the traditional passing game, or using the third scaffold, consider adjusting the tempo of the rhyme to fit students’ passing speed. If a student passes too slowly, the rhyme would sound like: “bee bee bummmbbbbllleeeee bee, stung an man upon his knee,” as if the third beat had a fermata over it.
Assessment Questions:
This type of steady beat behavior would lead to some questions in our assessment process.
If we notice a student who consistently passes the object too slowly, we’ll think back to how the student engaged with the steady beat in the previous scaffolds. Do they perform the steady beat accurately with patting or pointing when they don’t have the object? Do they speak the rhyme out loud with the rest of the class? If so, they probably just need more practice with the game. In that case, we’ll continue playing the game as normal and let the student develop steady beat in this context on their own timeline. Remember that steady beat is a developing skill that students will achieve at different times.
If we observe multiple students in the group who struggle to pass the object accurately, we can consider backing up to one of the previous scaffolds.
These strategies work well for lower elementary when we’re working with object passing games. Let’s talk about upper elementary scaffolds we might use with more challenging passing games.
Upper Elementary
An Appropriate Difficulty Level
With older students - especially those we consider to be older beginners - one trap that we can fall into is giving them activities that are physically too advanced in relation to their musical coordination. I believe we do this because we don’t want them to be bored. We don’t want them to check out because the activity we’ve provided is too easy. But in fact, the opposite can happen. If students don’t feel successful, they’ll check out and look for ways to make the activity more interesting. This tends to be through behavior that as the teacher, we’d prefer that they avoid. This means it’s often better to back up and take things slowly, rather than rushing straight into a challenging passing game.
One of the things that tends to separate passing games that are more advanced from games that are more simple is the number of objects in the circle.
Simple passing games will very often have one object that the whole class passes around. More complex passing games will often use an object for each student. This is tricky because the entire class has to coordinate when to pick up the object and when to drop it off - as well as which direction to drop it.
Upper Elementary Passing Game Scaffolds
Establish What Hand To Use
This may seem obvious, but take the time to establish where your right hand is and where your left hand is. Next, establish what it feels like to pass to the neighbor on the right. Students are likely following you in a circle as you lead the passing game. Because of this, might notice a few students on the other side of the circle who use the correct hand to pass the object, but follow you for the passing direction, which means they’re crossing their arm over their body and passing to the left - even when they think they’re passing to the right. Another on the other side of the circle will have an easier time if they don’t look at you. They can follow their immediate neighbors instead, that way everyone looks like they’re moving the same direction.
Add A Verbal Cue
Students will have an easier time with the passing motion if they have a verbal cue that explicitly says what to do on what beats of the song. Some options for a verbal scaffold are “pick up, pass” or even simpler, “me, you, me, you” or “mine, yours, mine, yours.” Students can also suggest their own cues! Whatever you choose, add the verbal cue as an ostinato to the main song as you perform the passing motions. Eventually transition to students whispering the ostinato, then thinking it in their heads. When you notice that students are ready, they’ll sing the song as they perform the passing game.
Add Objects Gradually
When first introducing the game, students will sing the song or speak the verbal cue ostinato without any object being passed. We’re just practicing the motion. When you see that students are successful, start to add in objects one by one. To do this you’ll have a pile of passing objects (erasers, cups, beanbags, etc.) next to you. As you sense students are ready, you can scaffold up by adding one object at a time into the circle. The reverse is true if you see that students aren’t ready to pass all together - you can collect the objects as they come around the circle and put them back in the pile next to you. This gives you a quick and easy way to control the difficulty of the passing game, based on what you see students need.
Try a New Formation
Not all passing games need to happen in a circle! If you anticipate that the game will be too advanced for students at first, try the passing game in a straight line before you move to a circle. When students pass in a line, there’s no confusion about which direction to pick up and and which direction to pass. You can also try having students sit in the circle, but turn to the right (as if they’re lined up in a train). From this “train” formation, students pass the object on the outside of the circle using their right hand. With this adaptation, students are only worried about picking up the object and dropping it forward. This eliminates the left and right passing confusion all together.
Establish A Plan for Mistakes
The whole game part of a passing game is that things can go wrong, and we all need to work together! So make a plan for what to do when we mess up, instead of making one student panic that they have 15 erasers in front of them and everyone is yelling at them to hurry up. My recommendation is that no matter what, keep up the passing motion in a steady beat. Even if the class messes up and there isn’t an object in front of each student, the motion continues. Similarly, if one student ends up with a pile of objects in front of them, they’ll continue with the beat motion and move them one at a time to their neighbor on the right. In other words, regardless of what’s in front of you, we’re all working together like a big clock.
Make Your Own Version in Small Groups
Sometimes passing games are difficult because there are just too many people in the circle, which makes it harder to reset. To counter this, consider having students come up with their own versions of the passing game in small groups. Depending on the grade-level you’re working with, students might be in groups of four, five, or six. An additional perk of this option is that there’s more buy-in when students have a personal stake in the creation process. Students also have the opportunity to create the routine as simple of as complex as they want with fake passes, tosses, etc.
Ask Your Students
The very last strategy is to hand the responsibility of learning back over to the students. All of our students, and especially upper elementary musicians, are more than capable of problem-solving on their own. If the process of teaching the passing game feels tricky and things aren’t going as you planned, hand the problem back over to the class. This moves the learning process away from us feeling frustrated and confused, and it puts students in the driver’s seat. Questions like, “Are we all passing to the same steady beat?” and “Why do you think that is?” are a great starting point. Give students a few moments to talk to the people around them and then work together to make a list of strategies on the board. Students are the ones who know what’s confusing them or making things difficult. We just have to ask them. From there, they can articulate their own strategies that we probably wouldn’t have come up with or clarified with the wording they need in order to understand.
Moving Forward
Passing games can be a lot of fun but they can also be frustrating if students are new to them! The important thing to keep in mind is that we can play passing games in some capacity regardless of what scaffold we’re using. There are ways to back up and move forward so students have the appropriate level of support and challenge.
