The Super Bowl is almost here and that means for many of our students, they have American football on the brain! Here are a few easy ways to tie in the theme of football in those days leading up to, or right after, the Super Bowl (or really any time during football season)!
Rhythm Play-alongs
There are some really fun rhythm play-along videos with a football theme that are a quick and easy way to review whatever note values students are working on. Ready GO Music has several with different rhythm combinations for different grade levels that I love, including everything from dotted quarter/ single eighths which I use with 6th grade, all the way to just quarter notes, which is a great lead-in to rhythm notation reading for Kindergarten this time of year.
Note Identification
I have used these videos from Music Maestra as part of sub plans several times to have my students practice identifying treble clef letter names, bass clef letter names, or just identifying line and space notes. There's even one that mixes treble and bass clef letter names which is a great challenge for my older students!
Halftime Show/ National Anthem/ Lift Every Voice/ America the Beautiful
Obviously there are a lot of ways directions you could go with this but the basic idea is to compare performances from various Super Bowls and have students vote on their favorites, explaining the reasons for their choices with musical elements of the performance. You could also focus on specific musical characteristics, whether it's dynamics, genre, tempo, timbres, or something else, and have students identify that element in each performance of the same song that they hear.
Music Notation/ Vocabulary Review Game
This is another general idea that can be applied to pretty much anything you want to review. It could be rhythm note values, note letter names, instrument sounds/ names/ families, dynamics/ tempo vocabulary, or whatever else you're working on. All you need is an image of a football field (look it up online and either project it, print it out, or draw a basic on on the board) and some questions/ tasks for each team to complete. Split the class into 2 teams, assign each team to one side of the field, and tell them that they get 5 yards for each correct answer/ completed task. You'll need some way to mark their progress across the field, whether that's writing with dry erase, magnets, or some other object you can move across the "field".
You can make it a little more complicated by having "downs" like in football rules, where if they get a question wrong it goes to the 2nd/3rd/4th down before the other team gets a turn, or just keep it simple and have each team take turns to see if they get 5 yards or not.
Jingles
I haven't done this in a few years but writing a jingle is such a fun composition activity for older students, and one of the main attractions of the Super Bowl for a lot of people is the ads! They choose a product, write a few lines promoting it, and then add a catchy melody. You could tie it into a unit on instruments of the orchestra by having them write jingles about specific instruments, or tie it into a unit on genres by having them advertise a genre, or write their jingles in a specific genre.
Super Bowl Food Rhythm Composition
This is another easy one to use with any age: notate different super bowl foods as rhythms and have students use them to compose, or just practice reading (and maybe playing on instruments) the notated rhythms. Obviously there are tons of options and you can adjust how you say certain words to fit with the rhythms students are working on in different grade levels, but here are a few examples to get you started:
I hope this gives you some fun ideas you can use in your lessons to bring the Super Bowl into your music classroom! Of course there are plenty more ways to incorporate the football theme- I'd love to hear ideas you've tried in the comments!
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