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Using literature in your elementary music classes is a great way to get students interested in music AND reading– as well as integrate with the other subjects. What better book to use than Where the Wild Things Are? This picture book is beloved by all, and it makes a perfect book based music lesson.
So… how can you integrate music with Where the Wild Things Are?
Today, I’m sharing some ideas that incorporate movement, body percussion, rhythm reading, and instruments.
As we go through these ideas, they will include pictures from my lesson pack on TPT. You can use the ideas without it, but it does make the lesson super easy, because you don’t have to set anything up. Just buy, download, and throw on the screen– boom! Lesson planning done.
These lesson pack comes in a quarter and eighth note set or a half and sixteenth notes set, so you can choose what grade level you want to use it with.
Want some free music teacher resources? Join the FREE Resource Library! After joining, you’ll get access to a library with powerpoints, lyric sheets, quizzes, worksheets, and more! Plus, you’ll get elementary music lessons emailed straight to your inbox to keep the ideas flowing and make lesson planning EASY.
Movement with Where the Wild Things Are
First of all, let’s get moving! This (free!) video on youtube uses actions from the story to have students move around and get their wiggles out. Spin, dance, walk, show your claws, and more with Where the Wild Things Are movement.
Add instruments to the book
Assign each of the characters in the book a rhythm (it helps if you have them printed out or projected on the screen). Each time that character appears, you play that rhythm. This can be considered a theme if you want to talk about the musical element of a theme with your students.
This is fun because the rhythms stay the same, but you change the order that in which they appear.
We typically read the book first, then we read it again with the instruments!
Then use the rhythms that we have used in the book and students can compose their own rhythmic patterns in small groups!
You could even assign an instrument to each character.
In the lesson pack, the slides show the rhythms and the order for each of the pages based on the illustrations to take the guesswork out.
Adding Ostinati to Where the Wild Things Are
Create a piece of music with the following ostinati! We practice these all together one day, and the next day we add layers with some students doing one ostinati and others doing others at the same time.
Note: you may need to choose 2 or 3, depending on the level of your students. Start with 2, then you can add more when they are ready.
We do this on body percussion first, and then on instruments!
After that, you could take it a step further and add xylophones!
There are three things you can do to make a Where the Wild Things Are music lesson (or 2 or 3….).
The lesson pack includes all of these, plus a few other activities like a rhythm sorting activity and a this-or-that activity.
You can get these in quarter and eighth notes or half and sixteenth notes.
Need more book based lessons? Check out this blog post with some of my favorites!
Happy teaching!
Becca
