Joyful Noise! Tempo Lessons

We have been doing several music lesson on tempo in class and learning to move our hands, our bodies and even drawing to pieces of music with different styles and tempos.  We discuss if a piece is fast or slow and the feelings that it invokes.  We try and match our body movements to the tempo of the music.

The Nutcracker Suite by Tchaikovsky works very well as an extension of these lessons as it has several pieces with very different paces.

For this lesson we gave the children each two scarves and we moved around the classroom to the tempos of the different selections from The Nutcracker.

  For a piece such as the Arabian Dance, the children had to move their bodies, but not their feet.

For the Waltz of the Flowers we did a group dance in the circle,

and of course, for the Russian number, there was a lot of jumping and lunging!

As another extension, we brought the music outside and gave each child ribbons to move around the entire playspace to the different selections of music.
Enjoy some joyful noise with your students or your children at home!