In the Hall of the Mountain King and others

Since Halloween is just around the corner, I've been looking for spooky music to turn into a movement activity. Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King" sounds Halloween-ish, so I searched for existing movement activities. I found two PDF handouts from John Feierabend on the GIA website, each containing two or three movement activities with extremely detailed instructions. One of them is the Mountain King, so I learned it and did it with my first graders last week. It involves tapping your head, shoulders, knees and toes, and alternating between hands and sides of the body. To make it more spooky, I changed the movements just a tiny bit so it would look like bugs were crawling on me and made lots of silly facial expressions. I introduced it by asking if anyone had ever felt like something was crawling on them. They all perked up, and I started the music. My colleague lent me some plastic spider rings, so I gradually added more onto my fingers, and by the final statement of the main theme, every finger had a spider on it and they were "crawling" all over. The students could barely contain themselves because they were giggling so much. I just love their cute little giggles! Anyway, at the very end, on the last big BOOM, I flung the spiders everywhere and had the kids pick them up for me. So, here are the links to these files. Check them out, they're both full of great things!
1. http://www.giamusic.com/pdf/Z159Fiereabendhandout2011WEB.pdf - includes "In the Hall of the Mountain King" and others.
2. http://www.giamusic.com/pdf/Z153_2009.pdf - contains detailed instructions for a Brahms waltz, as well as some songs and games.
Happy Halloween! :)

Let's start at the very beginning...

Hello! If you're reading this, you're most likely:
a) a general music teacher,
b) one of my Facebook friends, or
c) both.

Before I get to the purpose of the blog, here's the short version of my life story. I grew up in Houston, have a younger sister, went to college in Wisconsin, graduated in June with a BM in vocal performance and music education, and now I'm a general music teacher. The end.

Buy this! It's worth it!

I teach K-4th grade at an independent school, and so far I am loving it, despite some challenges. One of my favorite activities to do with my students is, as John Feierabend calls it in his Move It! and Move It 2! DVDs, "expressive movements to classical music." Essentially, you find a piece, an excerpt, a movement, etc, and you choreograph simple, repetitive motions that express the form, tone, dynamics, and overall feel of the piece. (Man, there are a lot of commas in that sentence!) Then, you gather your children, turn on the music, and have them copy you as you do the motions. Voila! It's that easy. You can have a conversation with your students and ask them what they think the music is about, what the motions mean, etc. Their answers are adorable and much more creative than mine.  Anyway, I love doing these activities with my kids, but I don't know that many of them, and as far as I can tell, there isn't an easy way to find them. So I decided to create a blog where I collect videos of expressive movements and compile them in one easy location. I'll share the ones I know, and I'd like you to share yours.

If you have a video of an expressive movement you'd like to share, here's what you should do:
1. Take a video of your expressive movement, and make sure all movements are visible.
2. Upload the video to YouTube.
3. Send an email to expressivemovementsblog@yahoo.com with the link to your video, your name and where you're from, the title and composer of the piece, where you first learned the movements, and any other information you want to provide (description/explanation of the movements, etc.).
4. I'll watch it to make sure it's legit, and then I'll post it on the blog.

I'll go first! Here is one that I created last spring during my student teaching. It's Mussorgsky's "Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks" from the suite Pictures at an Exhibition. The audio gets out of sync with the video at some point; my apologies, I don't know how to fix that. The A section is a baby chick trying to peck out of his/her shell. During the B section, I interpret the moves as: pushes part of the egg shell away, rubs stuff out of eyes, takes a good look around, realizes he/she has wings, and begins to flap them. The return to the A can be the chick trying more determinedly to get all the way out of his/her shell, and he/she finally succeeds in the end. Kindergarteners love this, and they have lots of different ideas about what the movements mean. I'll learn how to embed soon!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s91654wXMw8&feature=player_embedded

Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Problems? Email expressivemovementsblog@yahoo.com.