I Have Who Has Rhythm Matching

You can purchase  the PDF of this file for $3.00 on my TPT page.

Yesterday, I was searching Pinterest for teaching ideas and I came across a game called "I Have, Who Has" that I thought would be great for my classroom.  I believe the original idea came from this beautiful blog.  She had her cards available on TPT.  Well, it's a great idea, but why pay for it when I can just as easily make it myself.  Here's why.  I literally spent HOURS creating the game for myself and I'm not sure I have a winner with this one.  I don't know.  My classes are so big, it takes 10+ minutes to get through it all and by that time, the kids are stir crazy.

I was going to explain the game, but why re-invent the wheel?  Mrs. Miracle explains it beautifully:

One of my favorite ways to practice rhythm reading is a game called “I have/ who has.” Some of you may know this as “Glynnis’ Game.” During this game, one child holds a card and reads it. He/she might say, “I have tika-tika ta tika-tika ta. Who has tika-tika ti-ti ti-ti ta?” The child holding the card that says “I have tika-tika ti-ti ti-ti ta” reads his/her card, and so on, until all children have had a turn.

I didn't see that she had offered her template for free until just now. . . huh.  Oh well, I found another template.  Quick little side note:  I found my template on this website.  If you click on the link towards the top that says "I Have Who Has Cards by First Grade Brain", it will download as a word document onto your computer.  I took that idea and ran with it.  I replaced the "ABC"s with piano keys and I added the beginning and the end of the music staff to the Start and End cards.  I also decided that it was a lot of black and white to look at, so I made my "Who Has" in red.  

With my little ones, I put each card on a Power Point slide and followed along on my screen.  That way, I could model what the kids were to read and help them with it as the game progressed.

I'll say it again, I don't really feel like this was a sure fire winner.  The kids listened intently for their rhythm to be spoken but once it was, they were done.  That's when they fell apart.  Maybe this would work better in teams, maybe not.  I had my last groups (2nd Grade) talk to their group of 4 and work as teams whenever we got stuck.

Two wins that I did notice with this game: 

1.)  I got to see first hand how well (or not well) my students were able to read rhythms.  We still have a lot of work to do.

2.) I have one little guy who's a bit scrappy and angry because he's so small.  He doesn't get along with the students very well because he tells on them for minor things and pretty much ostracizes himself from the other kids.  Today we were playing the game and it was stretching out pretty long.  We were looking for someone who had a rhythm pattern and it took a long time before finally, my little guy stood up and said "I have it!" with a bright smile.  And the kids all cheered for him.  That made my whole day.

So, maybe we need to play this game several times before we are smooth and quick with it.  I think I may make some playing cards with the rhythms in a vertical line so the kids can do this at centers.  I'm thinking that they can have several cards and fan them like playing cards and still see all the rhythms.