Lit Lesson: A Spooky Story

Halloween is such a cool opportunity to make awesome, spooky music with children. It’s always one of my favorite times of the year! It’s also conference month, which means we always end up with a week of weird schedules and half-days. It can be hard to find a lesson that is engaging but also enrichment. Spooky books are a great solution. We try to stay away from things that are exclusively Halloween and do spooky things instead, so all students can participate. Last year, the kids hada blast with the Bill Martin Jr/Eric Carle book A Ghost Story. This year, we are exploring another Bill Martin Jr. book: A Spooky Story.

The book, the cards I use to help students remember their character, and a few of the instruments kids commonly choose.

This book is a very formulaic counting book. “Out of the shadows, out of the flum,” is followed by a number of spooky characters including a cat, witches, skeletons, and werewolves. The end of the book has those characters doing several things like wailing and turning, and we use that as an opportunity to crescendo. The characters finally go back into the flum, a good opportunity for a decrescendo.

Inevitably, a kid always asks, “What is flum?” Because the author made it up, kids use context clues to decide what exactly the flum is. Usually kids decide it is some kind of home world or portal for the spooky characters. Yay cross-curricular opportunities!

We begin by reading the book a few times, until the kids can identify the form of the book. We then add in D and F on tone bars to lay a spooky, minor sound blanket over the story. Students choose instruments for “shadows,” “flum,” and each of the 10 characters. This is a great way for students to explore instruments they don’t get to play very frequently like the ratchet, the thunder tube, and my piano. It’s also good practice to model the correct way to choose an instrument to fit a theme or character. My kids are always tempted to choose an instrument just because they like it, not because it is the best choice for the sound they want. So we go over the fact that we may love the bell tree because it sounds like Tinker Bell, but it’s probably not be the best choice for a spooky werewolf.

Students play through the book several times, switching instruments each time. I have cards for each of the characters so they don’t forget who they are. One student also serves as the narrator and reads the book. When the kids are ready, we record. Kids get very excited about sending a recording to their teacher, and beg me to play it for the kindergarteners to see if it scares them. You could very easily have kinder classes choose the spookiest recording.

Hope you have a spooky time with this fantastic book!

Lit Lesson: A Ghost Story

Halloween is around the corner, and that means it’s time to make some spooky music! This lesson provides an easy way to tie music to a book, and because the activity is so general you can shape it in several ways to fit in with what you are already learning.

One of my favorite Halloween lessons uses A Ghost Story by Bill Martin Jr with pictures by Eric Carle. Here is the book on Amazon. If you prefer to use Dark Dark Room, that is here. Since it doesn’t exclusively list Halloween, most of my students who don’t celebrate holidays also feel comfortable participating. I usually have something ready for them to do just in case, though.

The book is similar to the common story I remember reading as a kid, “A Dark Dark Room.” It is very formulaic: In a dark dark (noun) there was a dark dark (noun), and in that dark dark (noun) there was a dark dark (noun), so on and so forth. We eventually discover a ghost, who eventually discovers your pocket, and then… HE’S GOT YOU!

This book has so many possibilities! You can compare and contrast major and minor, talk about mood, focus on chords, focus on dynamics and crescendo in particular, really the options are endless.

For the older groups, we play an A minor chord on “dark dark” on tone bars. I allow them to choose what to play when, as long as it is A, C, or E. Students can choose to play the same thing each time, or change it up each time. (Yay for self-differentiation!) With the younger kids I dictate what they play, usually octave As or AC.

Once the kids have the basics down, we decide what we can do to make the book even spookier. My school uses thinking maps, so we use a bubble map at this point to brainstorm. Common choices the kids make include using chimes for the ghost, adding in my bigger drums later in the story, and adding a rainstorm with rain sticks and a thunder tube. I also like to have a few kids play Bb to add dissonance to the A minor chord.

Recording is a must for this book, students love hearing themselves play! I use a cheap plug-in microphone (similar one here) and audacity (free and awesome program, available here) to record class performances. We choose which take we like the best, and send it to their classroom teachers.

I hope you and your students have a blast with this ghost story!