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! :)
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