Simon Tiffin - Percussion Instruments

Simon Tiffin

Percussion Instruments

In Percussion Instruments, by Kayla Grace, readers are introduced to the idea of percussion instruments. The book begins by talking about the various roles that percussion plays in society, and then talks about the age of percussion instruments and their roles throughout history. Grace touches then on different types of percussion instruments and their various families that they belong to, as well as what different percussion instruments look like and what types of sounds they make. Finally, Grace delves a little bit into how to play percussion instruments, what they sound like, and what makes different instruments sound different. She dedicates the last few pages to pictures of various percussion instruments and a glossary for bolded words. Overall, I believe that this text could be successfully employed in an elementary classroom--likely a general music classroom--to gauge both overall literacy and prior knowledge of percussion terms. Perhaps a DR-TA would be an effective method of reading this piece with students. I think this is a good introduction to the idea of percussion instruments and allows to students to start deciding what types of instruments they may want to play in the coming years of school (if they are interested in the band program). This text could go well with a unit on different types of percussion after having played a few instruments the day before.