Originally Posted by The Orffsite Webmaster on Friday, October 15, 2010
Halloween, whether or not you care to emphasis it, is a great
time for listening and moving to some of the "spooky" classics. It's
time to bring out "The Hall of the Mountain King", "Danse
Macabre", "Funeral for a Marionette", and of course, Bach's
Toccata and Fugue in D Minor". Listening at the elementary level
doesn't mean sitting passively and staring at the music room walls. There are
free teacher made visuals in PowerPoint and Smart's .notebook formats for most
of these and other program music pieces on the internet. Better yet, make some
listening maps of your own. I've been using a simple visual that I made to go
with "In the Hall of the Mountain King". Instead of trying to
recreate the story of Peer Gynt, I went a different direction using an ocean
theme with a picture of a shark for the first section, a small group of
tropical fish for the second section and an enormous school of larger fish for
the loud final section. I plan to let students create their own story for
another short program piece. I will have a sheet of paper with the same number
of blank boxes as the sections in the piece. I'll let you know how this
experiment turns out later.
Besides
using visuals, movement is a great way to illustrate different sections of a
listening piece.
Happy
listening!
