Third grade students have spent the month of October learning about the song "In the Hall of the Mountain King" by Edvard Grieg. This piece was written as part of the Peer Gynt Suite, and each part of the song tells a story of the adventures of Peer Gynt. During this particular song, Peer sneaks into the hall of the mountain king, tiptoeing along until he is caught and needs to run out.
We started by listening to the song and adding "head, shoulders, knees, and toes" movements. As the song got faster, our motions got more complex. Can your child teach you the motions? Try to do the motions with the music:
After hearing the song for several weeks, I posed the following question:
"What is the mood of this piece of music? How did the composer use elements of music to convey the mood of this piece?"
Students wrote their answer, using wonderful musical vocabulary to explain that the song was spooky or intense. They provided examples such as "the song went from slow to fast" or "the song went from soft to loud" to support their topic sentence.
After writing, students finally learned the title of the piece, and we read the book of the same title, adapted by Allison Flannery and illustrated by Vesper Stamper. This story told the story that went along with the song.
To close out our unit, students got to play the song on the Boomwhackers, colored plastic tubes that each make a different sound. We played along with this video:
