Active Listening Activities: Elementary & Older
From the Activity Guide: Music Listening Activities
Music Maps are great advanced listening tools for kids to work on independently from elementary school and up. Depending on the age of your kid(s), they’re likely already familiar with the concept of story maps – visual representations of what happens in a story, from beginning to end. We’ve put our own musical spin on it with Music Maps. Music Maps will ask your child to focus and be attentive to what they’re hearing as they map out the progression of the music. Here’s how it works:
- Press play to listen to the piece of music. Listen once through before starting the music maps activity.
- Drag and drop the tiles each depicting different music events in the order that they happen in the music.
- When you think you have the order correct, click “Check My Music Map” to find out.
Take Music Maps Offline
You can also print out the music maps worksheets and complete the activity with good, old-fashioned paper and scissors as well.
- After listening once through a piece of music, cut out each of the cards depicting different music events.
- Listen again, one or more times, as your child works to put the events in the order that they occur in the music.
- Once they feel like they’ve put all the events in the correct order, they can glue or tape them to a sheet of paper and they’ll have made their very own music map!
Download and print out the two music maps and listen to their corresponding music below.
Find additional active listening activities for a variety of ages in the full Activity Guide: Music Listening Activities
Find additional online musical games: Online Musical Games