3 Great Winter Movement Activities For Music Class

 

If you teach in a cold climate, you know how wild kids can get on cold winter days when they can’t go out for recess to burn off all that energy! On those days it’s more important than ever to get kids moving in music class, for their sake and for yours! Here are three of my favourite movement activities for those freezing cold days!

 

Write the Room

Grades 1 – 5

Write the rooms can be a great combination of movement and education! In a write the room activity, flashcards working on whatever skill (rhythm reading, note reading, etc) are spread around the room or school. Each flashcard has a picture on it that matches a picture on the student’s response sheet. Students go around the room finding the flashcards and either copying down what they see or answering a matching question beside the matching picture. My Winter Rhythm Write the Room is a favourite activity of mine to pull out when the kids have had one too many indoor recesses and just need to move!

 

Form Movement Compositions

Grades 1 – 4

I love getting my students to make up their own movements to illustrate the form of a piece. This activity can work with any music at any time of year, but a particularly good piece to use in winter is Vivaldi’s “Winter”. Have students make their own movements for the two distinctive form sections of the song – the quieter, almost foreboding full ensemble sections and the wild soloist sections. Their movements can echo the difference in sections – small, subtle movements for the ensemble and then large bombastic movements for the soloist. Definitely a way for them to get the energy out!

 

Snowball Fight

Grades 2 – 6

Snowball fights aren’t allowed at our school, so it always piques my students’ interest when I say we’re having a snowball fight in music class. All you need for this activity is any sort of flashcard (rhythms, notes on the staff, etc) that you can print onto plain white paper. Print them out, then crumple them up into “snowballs”. I separate kids onto 2 sides of the room divided by a wall of music stands, and then play some music. While the music plays, the kids can toss the snowballs back and forth at each other. When the music stops, I pull 2 names on each team. Those kids need to pick up a snowball, uncrumple it, and read the rhythm/note name/answer the question on the paper. If they get it right, that’s a point for their team, and the snowball fight begins again!

 

I hope some of these activities help your students beat the winter wiggles!