All About Music!

Second to last week of school and I was thinking hmmm what should my theme be this week...MUSIC! So I picked 5 books that focused on music or sounds and came up with a project for each one. My goodness the kids loved learning about musical instruments.

We listened to "The Jazz Fly" which is about a fly that plays in a band and to make the performance more exciting he includes random sounds he heard throughout the day. The kids did straw blow painting to make colorful music popping out of the saxophone (the main instrument in the story) and then drew music notes, and then wrote a sentence about something/anything that makes noise.

We read "Froggy Plays in the Band" which is about Froggy starting a marching band with his friends and they all choose an instruments to play. The kids made Froggy and then got to choose any instrument that they would want to play in a marching band. I loved seeing the variety of instruments that each child choose.

One of my favorites is "Zin! Zin! Zin! a Violin!" which is about an orchestra of 10 instruments. We read the book, watched the movie, and then retold the story by sequencing the cards in order of appearance. The kids also loved trying to pick instruments cards that were in the story. We made it into a game because I set lots of cards on the table that were in the story and were not.

We read "Were Going on a Bear Hunt". This story was more about sounds instead of musical instruments. After reading the story about the family going on a hunt to find a bear we created a "treasure map" of all of the obstacles the family went through and remembered the sounds they heard during their journey. Great retelling/sequencing practice.

We also read and watched "Peter and the Wolf". However, I forgot to take any pictures though! We colored giant cards of the characters and the instruments that each represents. We were then going to make our own character finger puppets and retell/act out the story with just the music (not the words), but we totally ran out of time. They still enjoy the story and music though. One of my favorites!