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 […]
Vibrating Spoons STEAM Activity For young elementary students, we suggest starting with the dancing sugar experiment. Once your students understand that sound is vibrations, check out this great yarn and spoon experiment from Edventures with Kids that will help them explore sound even more.
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
Program Music Deep Dive During this activity, you’ll dive deeper into Vivaldi’s Winter from The Four Seasons. Read the poem this piece is based on. I. Allegro non molto–Frozen and trembling in the icy snow,In the severe blast of the horrible wind,As we run, we constantly stamp our feet,And our teeth chatter in the cold.II.
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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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Singing scales – Introduction to Major and Minor Most pieces of simple music use one scale throughout the whole piece. A scale is a pattern of notes organized in order of pitch (low to high or high to low). In Western music, scales usually contain 8 notes. Sing a major scale together (or sing along
Carnival of the Animals Carnival of the Animals is a short 14-movement suite by French composer Camille Saint-Saens. It was composed in 1886 and, when it was written, audiences would have found it to be pretty funny- it is full of musical jokes that listeners would have instantly recognized. Each movement is about a character,
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Music Mind Maps Write the name of the piece and the composer in the center of the worksheet. In the first branch out of circles (the purple circles) write down specific program elements that the music is trying to portray. To use Vivaldi’s Winter from The Four Seasons as an example, you might choose to
Music Listening Worksheet Have students complete this worksheet as they listen to a piece of music. It will help them engage in both how the music makes them feel as well as with what is happening in the music, building the bridge between musical devices and the moods they can create.
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Melody Maker Create a melody as a class with nothing but a white board (or chalkboard) and your imagination. One by one, students can choose which note should come next in the melody. It is easiest to just stick with quarter notes. Once you have filled up the number of bars of music you chose
