Another of my endeavors is to try to do an activity based on a musician or composer every couple of weeks - in reality this will probably be once a month since we have an already quite packed schedule and I do want Bear to just play as well. Montessori Beginnings (now About a Girl) is the one who has inspired me to do so with her posts on Peter and the Wolf and The Carnival of the Animals.
I decided to start with The Carnival of the Animals, since About a Girl sent me the file for her animals.
I got my background information for this piece from this lesson plan and from Wikipedia
Here is a breakdown of the movements:
Lions - Strings and pianos
Tortoise - Strings and pianos
Elephant - Double bass
The Aquarium - glockenspiel
Donkeys - Violin
Aviary - Flute Strings Piano
Fossils - xylophone
My absolute favorite movement is the Fossils. I love the sound of the xylophones. We listened to it here and here and the finale is here. Interestingly, I recognized a couple of the movements from ballet recitals in which I performed.
Day 1- Bear colored the animals while listening to the piece for the first time.
Day 2- We listened to the piece and sequenced the animals. We also danced like the animals.
Day 3- We listened to the music and talked about the musical instruments used to portray the animals.
Days 4,5,6 - we looked at photos of the instruments, talked about what family of instrument they were, listened to each instrument on our cards at this great site here, and listened for the specific instruments in The Carnival of the Animals.
Note: we did this over two weeks, so the days weren't sequential. We took a long break between Day 3 and Days 4,5,6.
You can download the musical instrument 3-part cards here.
(Some of the pictures are a bit blurry because I enlarged them quite a bit, but they work well enough to give one a sense of what the instrument looks like. A lot of the pictures came from About a Girl - see links above.)
If you do any music appreciation activities, please feel free to include them in the Artists and Art linky as musicians are artists and music is a form of art.
And I'm so sorry I forgot about pictures for this post.
And I'm so sorry I forgot about pictures for this post.
This is an awesome idea. I really liked the DSO site. We listened to an interesting audio book "Tubby the Tuba" recently, and this site would be absolutely handy to learn more about orchestra.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad to know that musicians will be included in the new art linky. My son has always enjoyed doing name that tune with classical music and playing around on the piano with his dad. I'm not sure where to move on with it from there (I am NOT the musical one in the family!) but at the very least we could do a week where we listen to famous pieces by a particular composer that he is already a bit familiar with. You have my mind working. :)
ReplyDeleteJC loves Peter and the Wolf. All we did was listen to the music over and over again (at her request) and read the book. We also acted the story out...or rather she did because it was her idea. I still want to do a puppet show with the music in the background.
ReplyDeleteMy goal is to do one musician or artist a month and do it month long so she gets familiar with the artist's work. We should try to come up with resources together! I can begin researching if you are interested. Maybe it will cut down some of the work for us?
JL - I'd love to work together. We just signed out a great little book on Mozart and plan to listen to some of his music next.
ReplyDeleteAre Peter and the Wolf and Carnival of Animals the only ones with orchestra instruments and storyline for music appreciation?
ReplyDelete@Tyng - I am not sure. I'd have to look into that.
ReplyDelete