Some animals are in danger!
Grade 1 have been finding out about the problems faced by many diffrent animals as part of their Unit of Inquiry. To help them with this we used music as a way to explore the characteristics of certain creatures. 

Elephant
We used music to create a real, walking, ear flapping, water drinking elephant. We built up a rhythm using drums and xylophone for the elephant's heavy feet, a bass drum makes the swinging body and every 5 steps the cymbals are the flapping ears. Every now and then the elephant stops for a drink of water using its long trunk. (Can you hear it?) Once we all knew how to do it we could then take our elephant for a walk wherever we wanted. It was great fun! 

We also learned about some less familiar animals such as galapagos tortoises, hummingbirds, lemurs and orcas. We watched videos and read some factsheets about them. We then put what we had learned into our music

The hummingbird music uses tremolos on xylophones to sound like the wings flapping very fast and the music hovers backwards and forwards. (Did you know that hummingbirds are the only birds that can fly backwards?) We also used a voice humming into a microphone.

The lemur music has two main ingredients. First the lemurs jump about on the keyboards as if they were jumping through the trees and then you can hear them having a good scratch, which we did with drums. 

 

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[ Download/View hummingbirds-lemurs-jan08.mp3 ]

[ Download/View elephant-jan08.mp3 ]