The second week of my unit looks at "adding details" in music to create specific representations of a story/theme. Today I worked on the resources needed for lessons 3 and 4.
The first resource is a scaffolded analysis for "Dawn to Dusk" which is a piece that portrays a day on the Gold Coast of Australia. The worksheet aims at ensuring that students of all abilities can start thinking analytically about the music they are listening to. It features some multiple choice questions as well and short response and identification questions.
Here is a part of the activity:
The next activity is a group work score reading activity where students have to fill in the storyline for the piece and find musical evidence to support it. Students need to identify motifs that help to tell the story.
The third activity is a melody dictation which has been taken from "Dawn to Dusk" directly and I have created a student sheet and a teacher sheet with the answer and key analytical elements.
The fourth resource is program notes on "City Lights" - these were taken from the first page of the score and will be used to help students understand the background of the piece as they start the activity. The class will then analyse the motifs in "City Lights" that represent specific parts of the story. These include the twinkling lights of the city below, the plan banking as it steers overhead. Although this is a class discussion/analysis, I have compiled a teacher version which has some of the key motifs listed with an excerpt underneath the explanation.
The final activity for this week is the individual composition take where students have to create a melodic line that represents a child's mood. For this activity I just created a sheet with various moods for the teacher to cut out so that students can pick randomly.
They include: Happy, playful, curious, hungry, tired, angry (and more).