As promised, here are your 2017 Super Bowl Rhythm Cards. These cards are updated with the teams playing this year.  Visit last year’s post for some links to other great football themed resources.

Click on picture to download your free rhythm cards.

A reminder from last year’s post on ideas for using these cards:

Just print this on colored paper or card stock in “football turf green” or the colors of your winning team.  Who will you be rooting for? Patriots or Falcons?

Here are a few ways you can use this in your lessons this week.

• Grab a football to use as a “drum” for rhythm practice.  Speak the phrases while “playing” the rhythm on the football.
• Clap a rhythm and have students guess the phrase.
• You say the phrase and students clap back or “play” back on the football.
• Play a matching game making pairs of each phrase and rhythm pattern.
• Assign a phrases for each note of a scale.  Pay each note for one measure of rhythm working your way up the scale. Example: C (Go! Fight! Win Tonight!),  D (Super Bowl 51),  E (Go Atlanta Falcons!),  F (Let’s Go Defense), etc.  Mix up the cards again for a new rhythm and new scale–or to reinforce the same scale with several different rhythmic possibilities!

Rhythm Cards in Action

In this video, the student chose 4 cards–he plays the rhythm of these cards in the Right Hand while playing a 4 chord pattern in the Left Hand. (these are last year’s cards–there are different teams in this year’s set)

In the next video, we use a football as a drum and echo the patterns from the rhythm cards.

Football Finger Exercises

I found these squishy footballs at the Dollar Tree and knew I had to get them for our Super Bowl theme in the studio.  Check out the video as one of my students demonstrates exercises for building finger strength, finger independence, practicing curved fingers, etc.

Music for the Big Game

In addition to Rhythm Cards and Football Finger Exercises, we’ve been playing Lady Gaga music and the NFL football theme.  For ideas on music for the Big Game, visit my post from earlier this week.

As I’ve been talking to my students how Lady Gaga will be performing that half-time show and talking about her music, most of them recognize “Bad Romance” from the movie SING from this clip! This is SUCH a cute movie!

Also, Bad Romance is in Piano Maestro! Score!!

This song has been in my head all week!  Rah rah ah ah ah!

Just For Fun

Just for fun, I threw up a football field table cloth to use as a photo backdrop, and had students pose for a quick picture.

Will do be incorporating any football activities in your lessons this week?