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!

Lit Lesson: Wide Mouthed Frog

I just love this book. The art is fantastic as well!

One of the first things my kindergarteners do when they walk by my room is to point at my instruments and beg to play them. I don’t blame them one bit. That’s what music is when you are 4-5 years old; instruments in your hand, making noise.

Enter a book I recently found at Goodwill and love: The Wide Mouthed Frog! I use the popup version by Keith Faulkner and Jonathan Lambert; you can get it from amazon here. (There is also a similar book here that uses different animals.)

In the book, a wide mouthed frog (who eats flies) meets a bird, a mouse, and a big green alligator. The kids love the pictures, and it is a good opportunity to have them create sound effects. We read the book without sound effects, then read the book again with sound effects to compare and contrast the two versions.

What I use in this lesson: the book, animal cards, and instruments

After students have read the book and know it fairly well, I pass out cards that represent the sound effects we make during the story. The groups I used were the frog, the flies, the bird, the mouse, and the alligator. There is also a giant splash at the end of the story, which I have everyone do. We read the story again, with each group only making sound effects for their animal. This helps minimize mistakes later, when students get instruments.

The next step is instruments. This was the first time my kindie kids had instruments, so we talked a LOT about instrument respect before handing out the goods. J We then did the book with instruments. We do the book several times and switch spots each time, so students have opportunities to try more than one instrument. With the instruments in my room, I use a frog guiro for the frog, shakers for the flies, triangles for the bird, sand blocks for the mouse, and castanets for the alligator.

The final step is to record students playing during the book, and having them listen. Students get so excited! I will also make a big deal of e-mailing the recording to their teachers.

Hope you and your kiddos enjoy this fantastic book!

I love that it all fits in my big blue box!

The Summer Of Books

My goal this summer was simple: find as many books for my classroom as possible, for as cheap as possible. Then, find the best way to use those books in class… Preferably BEFORE there are 25 kindergarteners in my room, staring at me their with adorable kindie-kid eyes. (Those eyes are located right above the kindie-honest mouths, AKA motivation to be over-prepared.)

Why not libraries, you ask? I’ve tried them, I really have. I promise. But I’m terrible about re-using books. I will use one book several times a year. When teaching music to K-5, it’s a surprisingly easy thing to do. I will also shamefully admit I’m terrible about returning them in two weeks. I see my classes once a week, and two class periods just isn’t going to be enough if I decide to base a grade’s program on a book. I also happen to really like my school’s librarian, and would prefer not to make her angry with my bad library habits. Plus, buying them now means I can avoid borrowing in the future, so buying books seemed like the best option for me.

Amazon is an amazing place, don’t get me wrong. But I have found that even with no shipping thanks to Prime, the cost of new books adds up quick. So, my first stop was the thrift stores. ALL OF THEM. I went to every thrift store in my city and positively plundered the children’s book sections. I got a lot of dirty looks from moms, and I’m certain a few people thought I was crazy, but a .99 cent book is a powerful incentive. I found books of every kind, and quite a few of them were ones I had never heard of before.

I spent some of my summer mentoring new music teachers in my district, and here is one question I got a lot: What do you look for in a book, and how do you know it will work in your classroom? While digging through piles and piles of categorized books that seemed to be a mix of out-dated Disney characters, books teaching toddlers to say “please” or use the bathroom, and absolutely perfect books for my music classroom, I looked for three main things:

1. Reading Level. Even when using a book with an intermediate grade, I keep to a K-2 reading level. Narration in higher-leveled books can get LONG. I like to have the kids making as much music as possible, and primary books deliver.
2. Repeated structures and refrains. Another great thing about primary level books is they tend to have a lot of repetition. A repeated phrase in the book is an easy opportunity to add a sung refrain, or a chant.
3. Onomatopoeia. Sound effects are huge in my state’s curriculum for K-1, and even for older kids they are very easy to transfer to instruments.

Did I find anything? HECK YES I DID. Eric Carle books, folk tales, short poetry books, you name it. Some of the very specific books I wanted (thanks to Pinterest) weren’t to be found, so I did make a pretty gigantic order to Amazon. But it wasn’t nearly as big as it could have been!

I will be going into more detail about what I do with each book soon. I hope you find a book that makes you do the happy dance!

Here are just a few books recently added to my classroom library!