Water Dance (2nd Grade)

Water Dance 
"Little drops of water, little grains of sand, make the mighty ocean, and the pleasant land."
 C  D  E       F   G  G C D E          F  G----  C       D   E    F    G  G   G     F    E   D      C---

Modal exploration, dynamics, melody "transposition," Orff instrument families

In 2nd grade, when the calendar flips to November, after all the excitement from Halloween activities, I've come up with something special involving this great book by Thomas Locker. During October we explored all of the interesting moods and modes of Halloween (I absolutely cannot wait to blog about Halloween activities!). The curiosity level is still quite high about what made those activities so exciting, so I decided to sort of play off those experiences. As a bonus, this lesson reviews the names of the Orff instruments and turns out to be a lovely discussion piece for musical dynamics. With "Water Dance", Thomas Locker describes each form of water almost like a riddle. So I read each page without showing the picture to the class and when I'm done with each description, they can guess what form of water it is. Recently, the second graders just wrote breathtaking Haikus about fall so they truly appreciated this book's play on words and beautiful illustrations. Using the above poem, "Little Drops of Water"- put all of the bars on the instruments and formed the melody you see above. Next, I teach them how to play this melody on Orff instruments by first using our bodies like an instrument. That way- when we change the starting pitch, they've already learned the contour and pattern of the melody- it's nothing to transpose it. At the instruments, I go through each page of the book. 

On the page with the text, I have a piece of paper covering it that says something like, "glocks play softly starting on G" and show it silently to the class. Then I read the page and then tap out my infamous "one two skidderiedoo" and those kids play on the appropriate notes. Here's the order and melodic choices I used for the book:

1.   Rain - woods start on C (medium-soft, mp)
2.   Stream -glocks start on G (soft- p)
3.   Waterfall - glocks & metals start on F (medium loud, mf)
4.   Lake- all instruments start on A (medium loud, mf)
5.   River- woods start on F (softly, p)
6.   Sea - all instruments start on B (softly, p)
7.   Mist- glocks start on A (very softly, pp)
8.   Clouds- metalophones start on F (medium soft, mp)
9.   Stormfront- basses only start on D (medium loud, mf)
10. Thunderhead- woods start on C, Metals start on A (loudly, f)
11.  Storm- All instruments play starting on ANY NOTE (very loud, ff)
12.  Rainbow- metals & glocks start on G (softly, p)
13.  Water - All instruments play on C (medium soft, mp)

Love this activity. It would be a great performance piece with student narrators. Also- add more instruments for color- rainsticks, thunder sheet, shakers, etc. If you have a larger group, you can have some assigned to creative movement with streamers or scarves. Try dimming the lights and flickering the lights during the lightening part.