** Beware: it's a lot of fun and my kids enjoyed it but if you show it to your students they use the "other word" for donkey a few times.
It reminded me of when I student taught. I'm an instrumentalist, flute is my main instrument and it wasn't until I fell in love with general music that I actually learned and found a love in singing. During my student teaching, I was quite shy/hesitant/scared of my singing voice still so I did a lot of listening exercises with the students and with 3rd grade I did an entire unit on the Carnival of the Animals.
It's fun to see how you grow as a musician and a teacher. I need to go back are revisit my Carnival of the Animals materials, some of it was great stuff. But since then and taking my Kodály levels I listen to music with a much more analytical ear. I will be sharing some of my ideas, past and present, for the Carnival of the Animals starting with The Aquarium.
I have a listening map that I did for The Aquarium, but of course it's at school. When I go into school later this month I will take a picture and post it. It was a map from my student teaching that had fish that iconically represented the melody. The students followed along the first time with me pointing along in the chart. They then described how the fish related to the melody. We also talked about instruments, dynamics and tone-color. With a second listening, the students used Popsicle stick fish to follow the melodic contour along with the listening map. We later used scarves to move musically to the phrasing and melodic contour (remember, this was not all in the same lesson.)
Listening to it yesterday I realized that The Aquarium is also a great listening example for dotted half note. While my youngest was napping today I made this powerpoint for students to read along with the rhythm. You can download the PDF of the powerpoint by clicking here.
Another great extension for this listening example can be found in John Feierabend's Move It DVD. If you don't have this, it's a must have for any must teacher! I've even used it on a concert with my 1st and 2nd graders. We used black lights. The students wore handbell gloves: the students on stage right wore left gloves and the students on stage left wore right gloves. They did all of the actions but the gloves made it look very complicated. They students loved it and it was a fun was to incorporate Art Music into their grade level concert.
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