Animal Crackers - Learning, Listening, Composing & Evaluating Activities

Animal Crackers - Performing Activities - Songs & Scores

Animal Crackers - Starter & Plenary Activities

Animal Crackers 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.  If you’re exploring the topic of Animals, then there’s something within this unit that will hopefully inspire both you as a teacher and your pupils

​This unit takes, as its starting point, Saint-Saëns’ programmatic suite “Carnival of the Animals” as a musical starting point to explore how composers have created descriptive music based on animals.  Pupils begin to explore birdsong as a type of music, listening to “bird-related” movements from “Carnival of the Animals” and performing different birdsongs.  They then move on to explore “The Aquarium” and create their own descriptive movement based on a fish or sea animal.  Pupils then explore another descriptive and programmatic work, Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” where different animals and characters are represented by different instruments of the orchestra, each with a unique timbre.  Pupils then explore the “March of the Royal Lion” and other movements from Saint-Saëns’ suite investigating how the composer has used timbre and other elements of music to create descriptive pieces before creating their own “class Carnival of the Animals” suite, linked by Saint-Saëns’ “March of the Royal Lion” theme.  There are a range of “animal-inspired” songs to accompany the unit, which can be sung as rounds and pupils are also given the opportunity to listen to other “non-animal related” pieces of descriptive music from different times and places by other composers.

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

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.

AS & A-Level Music Resources Shop

Home

About Musical Contexts

Subscribe to Musical Contexts

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)/Help

Musical Contexts Year 7 Baseline Assessment

2016 GCSE (9-1) Music

Resources Index

Musical Contexts Music Cover Bank

Musical Contexts Shop &

Seasonal Topic Packs

Musical Contexts Analyses of Musical Works

Musical Contexts “Warm-Ups” Compendiums

Musical Contexts World Music Resources

Musical Contexts Music History & Theory Resources

Primary/Key Stage 2 Music Resources Index

Secondary/Key Stage 3

Music Resources Index

Musical Contexts

SQUILT