Turkey Thanksgiving Pie Activity

Happy last week of November everyone!!!  I hate to tell some of you this but we're already on break- both my husband's and my district have the entire week of Thanksgiving off.  It's kind of nice to get our heads above water (or almost to the surface) before diving down for the final bit of school before Winter Break.  He goes back to two weeks of teaching then finals week (he teaches high school social studies) and I have three different performances within 8 days plus a fundraiser field trip.

Here's a little activity that we did last week that the kids had a great time with and they were composing.  I was able to use this as an assessment. . . an assessment in the final days before vacation.  Crazy.  I know!

I made the Turkey Fraction Files (you can find them on my TpT store).  The students were divided into 5 groups- each group had 6 people and each group had one complete pie of ta, ti-ti, rest, tika-tika, ti-tika, tika-ti.  My 4th graders also had two pies with syncopa and my 5th graders had 2 pies of each tom-ti and ti-tom.

Their task was this: individually compose/create one pie (and be able to read it to me).  Here's an example of a complete pie:

Then, with their group, combine their four beats with at least two other members of their group (AND be able to read it to me).  Here's an example of that:

Then, within their group combine more than two patterns (AND be able to read it).  Here's an example of four pies:

From there, the possibilities for how they did this were endless and it was fun to see how creative some of them got.  Some groups made chains of pies:

This group chose to wind their pies in a square pattern:

This group made their pies into a circle and then read it in a round with each other (clever, huh?!):

This group was into making letters, here's their "Z":

And here's their "F":

I love what this group did: they left spaces between the four beats to represent bar lines (by the way, see the bag in the middle?  Target find, I bought 5 of them, stuck the cards into them and that's the way I distributed the cards.  The kiddos when they picked them up returned them to their bag and that was that!):

This is one of my favorites, "Angry Pie Rhythm Face".  The eye brows make four beats, each of the eyes is four beats and the smile is composed of 16 beats.

In case I don't post before Thanksgiving day, I hope you all have a happy, healthy and wonderful Thanksgiving!