Musicroom is dedicated to helping you provide your child with a rich and rounded education, even during school closures. Every week we’ll be providing free outstanding, fun and rewarding music lessons for Key Stages 1, 2 and 3 that can be taught at home. Simple to use and no musical expertise is required!
This week, from Rhinegold Education, a Key Stage 1 (ages 5-7) lesson that connects music to the natural world, and, at Key Stage 2 (ages 7-11), an exploration of music and outer space!
Key Stage 1: Lesson 1 Music and the world around us!
Lesson: 1 Length: ½ hour.
Learning Objective: To understand how musical sounds can represent the real world around us. To create some original music.
1. Give each child some paper and colouring pencils.
Listen to the first movement of Winter from Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’. Ask your child to draw shapes, pictures and patterns in colours of their choice to suit the music.
2. Discuss with them why they made their choices of shape, object and colour.
3. Tell the child that the piece is all about ‘Winter’.
Read them the poem now that inspired the music:
Frozen and shivering in the icy snow In the strong blasts of a terrible wind
To run stamping one’s feet at every step
With one’s teeth chattering through the cold.
Ask them to make actions with their body to represent:
a.) shivering
b.) blasts of wind
c.) stamping of feet
d.) chattering of teeth
Read through the poem together with your actions.
4. Now play them the first movement of Winter again, and ask them to do their actions when they think they can hear these things in the music.
Discuss their choices, but remember there is no wrong answer as long as they can explain WHY!
5. Now help them to find some safe household items to use as percussion instruments
(e.g., plastic plate, plastic cutlery, a role of kitchen paper, a plastic bowl). Ask them to experiment using different items in different ways to make wintery sounds representing: a.) shivering b.) blasts of wind c.) stamping of feet d.) chattering of teeth
Let them experiment with the type of sound (scrapping, tapping, hitting), the dynamic (loud, soft) and the speed they make their noise (fast, slow).
Have some fun!
Now read the poem, with the music playing in the background and ask your child to play their sounds to match each line of the poem.
Key Stage 2: Lesson 1 Music and Space!
Lesson: 1 Length: ½ hour
Learning Objective: To understand what a musical ostinato is. An Ostinato is a continuously repeated musical pattern.
Listening:
1. Play the children Mars from Holst’s The Planets, just the first minute.
Start tapping along to the ostinato rhythm as the music plays. Ask them to join in when they can. If they need more of the track to get it, keep it playing!
2. Explain what they are tapping is called an ‘Ostinato’:
A continuously repeated musical pattern.
3. Using the ostinato rhythm from Mars, ask them to create a very quiet sound using their hands
(Let them experiment, e.g tapping two fingers against the palm of their hands). In the same way, now ask them to create a quite quiet sound using their hands. Now ask them to create a quite loud sound using their hands. Now ask them to create a very loud sound using their hands.
4. Listen again to the first 1.30 seconds of Mars.
This time, tap or clap the ostinato along with the music, starting very quietly and gradually getting louder using the various techniques you have come up with.
5. Introduce the words Mercury, Venus, Jupiter.
Notice how they fit into the Ostinato pattern. Repeat the words to the rhythm of the ostinato all together
6. Now everyone must tap/clap along with the ostinato pattern whilst they chant!
We’re going to make our own ostinato!
7. Listen to this audio track together and you’ll be guided through it.
8. Ask your child to make up some patterns of their own.
Can they lead you in repeating these patterns?
9. Listen to this cool explanation of an Ostinato:
Sing along together whenever the chorus comes up, ‘an Ostinato is a pattern that repeats!’.
By Rebecca White for Rhinegold Education.