Monster Trouble/ In the Hall of the Mountain King

 Monsters, Monsters, how much do I love thee?

Younger Children

I love using In the Hall of the Mountain King but with little ones I do this activity. It is a fun activity using locomotor movement and a modified melody. 

Older Students

 If you have the book, In the Hall of the Mountain King, I start this lesson by reading the book.

Decode the rhythm. 

See previous posts for additional ideas.

Create Music "Trolls" or "Troll Kings" or "Monsters":

Here is my example:

Step by step directions:

Some of my students creations:

Next, we learn this speech piece and perform it by opening the monster (high), closing it (low), turning around for "monster everywhere" and moving it side to side quickly for "fast" and slow for "slow", then running in place for "go go go". 

Then we perform the speech piece with the book, Monster Trouble, every 3-4 pages. SO MUCH FUN!

Enjoy!

Vegetable Creations and Monster's Don't Eat Broccoli

 If you have been on my blog before, you know my love of cute, adorable monsters!  

I have so many monster books, as you can see here!

Monster's Don't Eat Broccoli is a very cute book with a visual "twist" at the end. The kids love the illustrations and they always make me giggle, too! 

I have several ways I use this book in the music room, here are two:

Song with Book:

Read book, sing song every time "Fum, Foe, Fie, Fee" appear. 

Improvisation:

Print the 2-beat vegetable building blocks found here. Here are a few to show what they look like:

Small groups create elemental forms using ABAB (each letter is one 2-beat building brick), ABBA, AABB, AAAB, or ABCA.  Practice performing with body percussion, transfer to barred instruments set up in C pentatonic. 

Could be performed in rondo form:

A: Song

B: Group 1 performs improvisation using their 16-beat rhythm.

A: Song

C: Group 2 performs improvisation

Etc. 

Rhythmic Speech and Body Percussion

Here are a few slides to show what this looks like. Click here for the link. 

Enjoy!

Musical Monster Fun!

 I enjoy the costumes, trick or treating, and the silly, playful fun of Halloween. I have leaned more towards monsters in the past several years as they aren't really Halloween and can be use any time of year. 

On my Patreon site there are SEVERAL posts using children's lit, songs, games, speech pieces, solo singing activities, etc. This is one recent massive post, with 3 embedded videos!  Here is a pic of some of the things from that one post: 

Past Posts:

Monsters Love Underpants

Sing Me a Monster

Hope you enjoy!