Chinese New Year Level: Early Grades - Creative music

Play an Animal (dynamics, timbre, tempo, pitch)

This is a music Corner activity for small groups. First put out a selection of instruments, enough for one each. You may have some that are a bit like Chinese ones – you can check here:

Include chime bars C, D, E, G and A too. This is one of the many sets of five notes that form a pentatonic scale. The pentatonic has a definite Chinese sound and the great thing about a pentatonic set of notes is that they all sound good when played at the same time!

Allow the children to explore each instrument, encouraging them to use their own words to describe the sounds, while also supplying some words of your own based on the elements of music.

Next, ask the children to make up music about this year's Chinese Zodiac animal. For the Year of the Pig, they may find an instrument to play slowly or one that can go grunt, grunt. The Year of the Horse sounds might move fast, or go clip, clop. Even if the sound doesn't seem to relate to the right animal, the child will still be making some kind of connection that you can talk about together. Children generally find it easy to believe that an instrument can 'be' an animal, either making the sound or representing the movement.

Winning and Losing (pitch, social studies)

In the story of the Chinese Zodiac there was a winner of the race. Using puppets and vocal sounds, the children might make up their own songs as they explore how it feels to win and to lose. Making up songs at this stage is about exploring, selecting some sounds but not others, and changing the sounds to reflect their ideas, thoughts and feelings. Aim to say something positive about each child's song and also offer an additional idea or suggestion. The children could use the words (or not):

• Happy you won
• Sorry I lost