Xylophone Composition This composition activity combines music and math is such a smart and simple way. Children will get to flex their creativity and work on their basic addition or subtraction skills all at the same time. This blog post goes into even more detail, but the basic steps are as follows: Grab an instrument […]
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Composer Spotlight – Leonard Bernstein Leonard Bernstein was one of America’s best-known composers. He was also an accomplished pianist, conductor, and educator. Learning about Leonard Bernstein is a lot of fun because he was alive recently enough that you can see videos of him in action conducting his own music or teaching all about the
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Dancing Sugar STEAM Activity This blog post from My Mundane & Miraculous Life contains two simple science experiments to help kids explore sound. We love the first experiment that makes sugar dance! Sound Wave Visualization with Dancing Sugar Cover a bowl tightly with plastic wrap or pull a balloon tightly over the opening. You may
Ragtime Dance Ragtime music is a forerunner of jazz music and was popular around 1900. It grew from African American musical traditions, combining the jig and march styles commonly performed by African American bands. Ragtime became immensely popular as a musical style and a dance. It is called ragtime because of its syncopated, or ragged,
Drumline A drumline is a group of percussionists and performers that march and move their bodies while they’re playing music. Watch this video to see the Montbello Drumline in action. Now, create your own classroom drumline. Choose three (or more!) simple rhythms as a class. We suggest that one of the rhythms is just quarter
You’re an Arranger! We learned that an arranger is someone who takes music that already exists and creatively changes it to be different in some way. You students can become arrangers with this simple activity. Choose a simple song that your kids all know. For example, Happy Birthday, the ABC song, or Row, Row, Row,
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Multisensory Music The best first step to performing music is to understand it and the way it feels. This multisensory activity is a fun way to help students gain additional vocabulary to describe music. Hearing Multi-Sensory Playlist Use this playlist throughout the other sensory activities, or keep it simple and just listen to it as
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Teamwork for Two (and more!) As any practiced performer knows, performing in a small ensemble, like a duet, can often require more concentration than performing in a larger ensemble. In a duet, you have to be completely aligned with the other musician – you have to listen to and hear what they’re doing, but you
Musical Thunderstorm Lightning and rain storms are perfect to go along with with a thunderous piece of music. The thunderstorm section from Rossini’s William Tell Overture is a great example of how music can help us to imagine amazing stories and situations. This is a fun activity that can take as little or as much
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Musical Storytelling and Kathak Dance During the Kahe Chede Mohe performance below, our orchestra is joined by Deepali Lindblom, a dancer performing the Kathak style of dance. Kathak is one of the seven Indian classical dances. It originated as a form of storytelling and through centuries became more refined and complex in technique and storytelling.
We’ve Got the Blues Use this activity to have students create their own blues story. Students can listen to “I’ve Got the Blues” by Sam Myers to get a sense of how lyrics and storytelling can happen over a basic blues line. Then, using this backing track video, have students create their own blues story.
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Peter and the Wolf We encourage you to first have your students watch or listen to a performance of Peter and the Wolf. We like this one quite a bit: Act It Out Next, bring the story to life! Here are different scenes from the story that students can act out. You can find these
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