Minibeasts Level: Early Grades - Creative music

Mouse and Cat (pulse, tempo, dynamics)

A Little Mouse

A fun way to teach this is to say the rhyme first using a puppet mouse, and surprise the children with the loud last line. When they know the rhyme, the children move gently into a space and curl in a ball, chanting the words rhythmically and quietly until the loud, last line, when they jump up!

• A little mouse hid in a hole
• Hid softly in a little hole
• When all was quiet, as quiet could be
• OUT POPPED HE!

A Naughty Cat

• A naughty cat ran round the house
• He hoped to find a little mouse
• But when the mouse came out to peep
• The tired cat was fast asleep!

The children stalk around, being the bold cat, saying the words rhythmically then get gradually slower and quieter towards the end when the cat curls up and falls asleep.

The change in the mouse verse is sudden but the change in the cat verse is gradual. Talk through what the children are doing to give them the vocabulary to talk about louder, quieter, faster, slower.

Mouse and Cat on instruments (structure, pitch, tempo)

Divide the children into two groups. One group is the mouse, the other the cat. Everyone chooses an instrument from the Mouse section or the Cat selection that you have put out earlier.

A capable child (or group of children) from the Mouse group says the words of A Little Mouse expressively, one line at a time. At the end of each line, the Mouse group instrumentalists imitate the speed and loudness of OUT POPPED HE!

Next the Naughty Cat group can do the same with their poem. You now have two little performance pieces and each group gets the chance to listen to the other group. It's a good opportunity for you to ask the listening group to do Three Stars and a Wish - say three things they liked about the performance and make one, positive suggestion for improvement. The performers might then have another try.

'Think the words'!

A variation on this activity is for the children to 'think the words' as they play the sounds without speaking. Sound recordings are easy to do on a mobile phone and there's no problem with excluding children who are not to be filmed on video. Here's a recording of our Naughty Cat group. The cat is represented by the xylophone and the mouse by a shaker and Indian bells. I like the way the 'cat' did fast, high-pitch sounds for running round the house, then slower sounds for going to sleep. One of my 'wishes' in Three Stars and a Wish was for the sleeping cat sounds to get lower and lower in pitch, which is what happened in this second recording.