Water Music - Learning, Listening, Composing & Evaluating Activities

Water Music - Performing Activities - Songs & Scores

Water Music - Starter & Plenary Activities

Water Music from Musical Contexts provides a range of fun and exciting music activities and learning opportunities combining singing, performing, composing and listening and appraising with all of the resources you’ll need in one place!  Ideal for non-specialist music teachers (with a wealth of supporting media files to model tasks and a detailed scheme of work and lesson plans) and a wealth of fresh inspiration for music specialists.  Whether you’re exploring the topic of Rivers, Seas, The Water Cycle or Water in general, then there’s something within this unit that will hopefully inspire both you as a teacher and your pupils.

This unit provides pupils with the stimulus of water as a basis for singing, performing, composing, improvising and listening and appraising to a wide variety of water-inspired music.  Pupils begin by creatively composing in response to a variety of images of water in its various forms before exploring how the composer Smetana describes the course of a river in his tone poem “Vltava”.  Pupils explore the concept of melodic shape, identifying melodies which move by step and leap and compose their own “wandering river” melody using entirely stepwise motion which is used as part of a larger-scale composition describing the various stages of the water cycle.  Pupils move onto the sea and make connections between music and art learning about the impressionist music of Debussy’s “La Mer” and use Monet’s sea paintings as the basis of an improvisation.  Dynamics is a key concept throughout the using including gradations of dynamics and the crescendo.  Finally, pupils use their learning from the unit to add “water sound effects” to a traditional North American-Indian legend before listening to Handel’s “Water Music”.  

Element Focus - Pitch, Timbre & Dynamics, Melody & Harmony

Home

FREE Sample Materials

About Musical Contexts

Subscribe to Musical Contexts

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)/Help

Feedback

Primary/Key Stage 2 Music Resources Index

Secondary/Key Stage 3

Music Resources Index

Contact Musical Contexts

Year 7 Baseline Assessment

2016 GCSE (9-1) Music

Resources Index

Music Cover Bank

Musical Contexts Shop &

Seasonal Topic Packs

Please feel free to copy, modify, customise, personalise and use Musical Contexts resources for your own use, with your students and pupils, within your own school or college and on internal Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs). 

​Please use the resources responsibly and ethically, as continued irresponsible free sharing and poaching of paid published resources (particularly “free sharing” to Facebook groups and the current trend of setting up “free” music resource websites using Musical Contexts and other published resources) is not only a breach of copyright, but the implications of making these publicly available on websites, even if only for a short period of time, are that other schools and teachers can freely access them meaning a loss of earnings for authors and publishers, jeopardising future resource development for YOUR subject specification and will only sadly see the demise of sites such as Musical Contexts which rely on the support (and honesty) of schools and teachers for future development. 

Musical Contexts is unitedly working with a range of publishers together to monitor Facebook groups for such “free sharing” and regular checks to the web are made using a program which scours the web for PDFs using automated code (scrapers).  Any subscriber found freely sharing Musical Contexts resources online will have their log-in cancelled with immediate effect and no refund given in respect of this.

Getting Started - First Music Lesson Ideas

“DOITNOW”, “Plenary” & “5-min Reading” Bank