Animal Crackers - Learning, Listening, Composing & Evaluating Activities

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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.

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